New Dinosaur Species With Spiky Backbone

New Dinosaur Species With Spiky Backbone Discovered in Argentina

Paleontologists in Argentina have uncovered a dinosaur unlike anything ever seen before. Alive some 140 million years ago, these majestic herbivores featured long, forward-pointing spikes running along their necks and backs. These spikes may have served a defensive role, but their exact purpose now presents a fascinating new mystery.

A herbivorous dinosaur that fended off predators with a row of spines running along its back and lived 140 million years ago has been found in Argentine Patagonia.

The discovery of the new species of dicraeosauridae, christened Bajadasaurus pronuspinax, was revealed in Scientific Reports.

A reproduction of its spiny neck was exhibited in the Cultural Science Center in Buenos Aires.

"We believe that the long and sharp spines—very long and thin—on the neck and back of Bajadasaurus and Amargasaurus cazaui (another dicraeosauridae) must have been to deter possible predators," said Pablo Gallina, an assistant researcher at the state council of scientific and technical investigations (CONICET) and Maimonides University.

"We think that had they been just bare bone structures or covered only by skin, they could have been easily broken or fractured with a blow or when being attacked by other animals," he added.

"These spines must have been covered by a keratin sheath similar to what happens in the horns of many mammals."

Bajadasaurus was a quadruped and part of the wider Sauropod family that lived from the late Triassic period (around 230 million years ago) until the end of the late Cretaceous (70 million years ago).

Amargasaurus cazaui lived in the South American continent around 15 million years after Bajadasaurus and both species were found in the Neuquen province around 1,120 miles (1,800 kilometers) south of Buenos Aires.
It's the same zone in which Giganotosaurus carolinii, considered the biggest carnivorous dinosaur of all time, was discovered in 1993.
It lived during the late Cretaceous period and could have fed on Bajadasaurus.
CONICET said in a statement the spines could have been used to regulate the dinosaur's temperature or even to render it more sexually attractive to a potential mate.

It said Bajadasaurus could have had a fleshy hump between the spines that served a similar role to that of a camel.

The Bajadasaurus skull is the best preserved example of a dicraeosauridae ever found.
"Studies suggest this animal spent much of its time feeding on ground plants while its eye sockets, close to the top of its skull, allowed it to key an eye on what was happening around it," said CONICET.
The research has been published in Scientific Reports.

30 ways to make money online

30 Ways to Make Money Online Blogging (On the Side) in 2019

Making Money Online Blogging

While there’re a lot of different ways to make money online, in this article, we’ll specifically explain how to earn money with a self-hosted WordPress blog.

To build a WordPress blog, you’ll need to own a domain name and web hosting.

A domain name is your website’s address on the internet such as Google.com or IsItWP.com, and web hosting is where your website’s content and files are stored online.

Blog Monetization

Once you’ve gotten your blog set up and traffic is coming your way, you can monetize your blog and start making money. Some ways to monetize your blog are:

• Display Google AdSense: Make money by displaying Google ads to your blog audience.
• Affiliate marketing: Refer different products and earn a commission when someone purchases from your referral.
• Sell direct ads: Keep 100% of ad revenue by selling direct ads, without joining any ad networks, like Google AdSense.
• Publish sponsored blog posts: Allow your sponsors to publish a post on your blog and endorse their products.
• Publish paid reviews: No need to wait until someone purchases your affiliate product. Get paid by writing reviews.
• Flip blogs and websites: Just like real estate, flipping blogs and websites is a real business.

Monetizing a website with Google AdSense is probably the easiest way to make money online.

Google AdSense is a Google-owned advertising network that allows bloggers and website owners to monetize their website by displaying text, image, video, and other interactive advertisements on their websites.

Here are a few benefits of using Google AdSense to monetize your website:

• Minimal requirement: Unlike other ad networks, you’re not required to have a huge traffic volume in order to join Google AdSense. If you provide quality content on your website, then you can apply to join AdSense.
• More revenue: Google ads are targeted by site content and audience. AdSense ads are more targeted than other contextual ad networks. Because of this, it helps you generate more revenue than any other contextual ad network.
• Easy to use: Ad management on WordPress is easy with Google AdSense. For optimal ad placement, you can either choose an AdSense-ready WordPress theme or ad management plugins such as AdSanity.

Get started with Google AdSense now!

2. Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing, you can choose a product you like, promote it online, and earn commissions when someone purchases it through your referrals.

The best thing is, with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to bloat your website with annoying ads. You can refer the products within your articles and generate a solid income when your readers purchase them.

You can start affiliate marketing in 2 simple steps:

Step 1: Find the Product You Want to Promote

The easiest way to find a product you want to promote is to join an affiliate program like Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, or ShareASale and browse through their site.

After selecting the product, you can get an affiliate link and promote the product through that link on your site.

Blog Monetization

Once you’ve gotten your blog set up and traffic is coming your way, you can monetize your blog and start making money. Some ways to monetize your blog are:

• Display Google AdSense: Make money by displaying Google ads to your blog audience.
• Affiliate marketing: Refer different products and earn a commission when someone purchases from your referral.
• Sell direct ads: Keep 100% of ad revenue by selling direct ads, without joining any ad networks, like Google AdSense.
• Publish sponsored blog posts: Allow your sponsors to publish a post on your blog and endorse their products.
• Publish paid reviews: No need to wait until someone purchases your affiliate product. Get paid by writing reviews.
• Flip blogs and websites: Just like real estate, flipping blogs and websites is a real business.

Monetizing a website with Google AdSense is probably the easiest way to make money online.

Google AdSense is a Google-owned advertising network that allows bloggers and website owners to monetize their website by displaying text, image, video, and other interactive advertisements on their websites.

Here are a few benefits of using Google AdSense to monetize your website:

• Minimal requirement: Unlike other ad networks, you’re not required to have a huge traffic volume in order to join Google AdSense. If you provide quality content on your website, then you can apply to join AdSense.
• More revenue: Google ads are targeted by site content and audience. AdSense ads are more targeted than other contextual ad networks. Because of this, it helps you generate more revenue than any other contextual ad network.
• Easy to use: Ad management on WordPress is easy with Google AdSense. For optimal ad placement, you can either choose an AdSense-ready WordPress theme or ad management plugins such as AdSanity.

Get started with Google AdSense now!

2. Affiliate Marketing

With affiliate marketing, you can choose a product you like, promote it online, and earn commissions when someone purchases it through your referrals.

The best thing is, with affiliate marketing, you don’t have to bloat your website with annoying ads. You can refer the products within your articles and generate a solid income when your readers purchase them.

You can start affiliate marketing in 2 simple steps:

Step 1: Find the Product You Want to Promote

The easiest way to find a product you want to promote is to join an affiliate program like Amazon Associates, Commission Junction, or ShareASale and browse through their site.

After selecting the product, you can get an affiliate link and promote the product through that link on your site.

4. Publish Sponsored Blog Posts

Publishing sponsored posts is one of the easiest ways to make money online.

You can publish a sponsored post once in a while to make some extra income from your WordPress blog.

When publishing a sponsored post, make sure to explicitly tell your audience that it’s a sponsored piece of content. Otherwise, it might come off as a little out of sync to your trusting audience. Plus, in some countries, like the United States, a blogger needs to comply with FTC’s Endorsement Guide by disclosing whenever a post is sponsored.

Biggest Dinosaur

'Biggest Dinosaur Ever' Discovered in Argentina

Diego Pol lying by large femur thigh bone fossil of thenew species find

New Species of Dinosaur Is the Largest Land Animal to Ever Walk the Earth

One hundred million years ago, a colossal creature the size of a 737 thundered through the forests of South America, picking trees clean with its head extended five stories in the air and sending ferocious T. rex-like therapods scattering like mice below its trunk-sized legs.

It’s the largest dinosaur ever found — a titanosaur so huge that its skeleton can’t even fit into a single room in its home at the American Museum of Natural History.
Scientists this week unveiled their first study on the ancient beast alongside its new, official name, ­Patagotitan mayorum, or, The Giant from Patagonia.

Astoundingly, the Big Apple’s biggest resident wasn’t even fully grown when it died (scientists don’t know if it was male or female) — and an even more whopping cousin could be waiting to be uncovered, experts said Wednesday.

“This animal [hadn’t] stopped growing at the time of death,” said Diego Pol, an Argentina paleontologist who helped dig it up.

The moniker Patagotitan mayorum is a nod to its place of discovery — the remains were found in the Patagonian region of Argentina in 2012, on a farm belonging to the Mayo family in La Flecha, about 800 miles south of Buenos Aires. “A rancher in the middle of Patagonia was looking for sheep on his own ranch. He saw something on the ground that caught his attention. It was the tip of the leg bone that was sticking out of a rock,” Pol said.

Stunned sheep farmers notified a local museum and Pol and his team spent the next few years excavating seven partial skeletons and more than 150 bones from the site.

A photo from the dig shows one team member lying beside a single P. mayorum femur bone— it’s larger than he is.

The scientists reproduced the skeleton in 3-D models, but the specimen was too large to fit in any local museum, Pol said, so they sent a fiberglass cast to New York last year.

It has been welcoming visitors to the museum’s dinosaur floor ever since — literally, because its massive skull extends all the way out into the elevator bay.

“[It’s] probably one of the world’s great selfie spots,” said John Flynn, the museum’s curator of fossil mammals. Now scientists are piecing together a picture of how the P. mayorum lived.

They believe the supersized sauropod roamed the forested flood plains of Patagonia — which extends to the southernmost end of Argentina and Chile — during the Late Cretacious period.

Titanosaur is a relative of the Brontosaurus, but twice as long and four times as heavy.

The gargantuan animals lived among the kinds of predators that terrorize the nightmares of any kid who’s seen “Jurassic Park,” but were so much larger, they made the meat-eaters look like pip squeaks, researchers say.

“[They’d] look like dwarfs when you put them against one of these giant titanosaurs,” Pol told the Associated Press. “It’s like when you put an elephant by a lion.”

The only chance a therapod had of sinking its teeth into an adult titanosaur was feasting on its carcass after it kicked the bucket.

“There were some very large carnivorous dinosaurs that would prey on the young and sick ones. They’re opportunistic feeders,” said Flynn.

But P. mayorum was a gentle giant. The species moved slowly because of their size and put most of their energy into eating enough to stay alive.

One Natural History guide estimates the titanosaur would have consumed more than 100,000 calories a day — about 177 Big Macs — by using their long necks to munch on leaves, ferns and seeds.

The dinosaur is a new species and one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered.

“I don’t think they were scary at all. They were probably massive, big, slow-moving animals,” Pol said. “Getting up. Walking around. Trying to run. It’s really challenging for large animals.”

Incredibly, their eggs were probably around the size of a grapefruit, the scientists said. But unlike human babies, which take six months to double in size, newborn titanosaurs doubled their weight in two weeks — and again in a month.

At 1 year old, a titanosaur would have weighed 1 ton — the same as a fully grown polar bear.

And how did such hulking creatures get down and dirty to reproduce in the first place?

“Very carefully,” Flynn quipped.

Even though archeologists may still discover larger titanosaurs than the one now residing on the Upper West Side, we may never find a larger species, as scientists believe the 76-ton titanosaur is about as big as creatures can get.

“These may be approaching the limit of the possible size of how large you can get if you live on land,” said Flynn.

But wide-eyed kids who visited the museum on Wednesday to meet the newly-named dino said this one was scary enough.

“I was shocked. I was like, ‘That is humongous!’ ” said 9-year-old Rhyan, who was visiting from New Jersey and estimated the titanosaur is around the size of 30 giraffes and elephants combined.
Fellow pint-sized paleontologist Liz, 11, disagreed with that conclusion. “It was as big as 500 giraffes,” the Long Island youngster declared. “I didn’t think it would be that big!”
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Earth's Largest Extinction

Earth's Largest Extinction Event Likely Took Plants First

Little life could endure the Earth-spanning cataclysm known as the Great Dying, but plants may have suffered its wrath long before many animal counterparts, says new research led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

About 252 million years ago, with the planet's continental crust mashed into the supercontinent called Pangaea, volcanoes in modern-day Siberia began erupting. Spewing carbon and methane into the atmosphere for roughly 2 million years, the eruption helped extinguish about 96 percent of oceanic life and 70 percent of land-based vertebrates -- the largest extinction event in Earth's history.

Yet the new study suggests that a byproduct of the eruption -- nickel -- may have driven some Australian plant life to extinction nearly 400,000 years before most marine species perished.

"That's big news," said lead author Christopher Fielding, professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences. "People have hinted at that, but nobody's previously pinned it down. Now we have a timeline."

The researchers reached the conclusion by studying fossilized pollen, the chemical composition and age of rock, and the layering of sediment on the southeastern cliffsides of Australia. There they discovered surprisingly high concentrations of nickel in the Sydney Basin's mud-rock -- surprising because there are no local sources of the element.

Tracy Frank, professor and chair of Earth and atmospheric sciences, said the finding points to the eruption of lava through nickel deposits in Siberia. That volcanism could have converted the nickel into an aerosol that drifted thousands of miles southward before descending on, and poisoning, much of the plant life there. Similar spikes in nickel have been recorded in other parts of the world, she said.

"So it was a combination of circumstances," Fielding said. "And that's a recurring theme through all five of the major mass extinctions in Earth's history."

If true, the phenomenon may have triggered a series of others: herbivores dying from the lack of plants, carnivores dying from a lack of herbivores, and toxic sediment eventually flushing into seas already reeling from rising carbon dioxide, acidification and temperatures.

'It Lets Us See What's Possible'

One of three married couples on the research team, Fielding and Frank also found evidence for another surprise. Much of the previous research into the Great Dying -- often conducted at sites now near the equator -- has unearthed abrupt coloration changes in sediment deposited during that span.

Shifts from grey to red sediment generally indicate that the volcanism's ejection of ash and greenhouse gases altered the world's climate in major ways, the researchers said. Yet that grey-red gradient is much more gradual at the Sydney Basin, Fielding said, suggesting that its distance from the eruption initially helped buffer it against the intense rises in temperature and aridity found elsewhere.

Though the time scale and magnitude of the Great Dying exceeded the planet's current ecological crises, Frank said the emerging similarities -- especially the spikes in greenhouse gases and continuous disappearance of species -- make it a lesson worth studying.

"Looking back at these events in Earth's history is useful because it lets us see what's possible," she said. "How has the Earth's system been perturbed in the past? What happened where? How fast were the changes? It gives us a foundation to work from -- a context for what's happening now."


The above story is based on Materials provided by University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Original written by Scott Schrage.

Chocolate Gemstones

Gemstones That Look Like Deconstructed Chocolate Bars

Photo credit: Rob Lavinsky/iRocks.com

Chocolate calcite

Resembling an artful edible decoration from some top Swiss chocolate,  Incredibly deep brown crystals that are thoroughly infused with microscopic hematite grains, giving them a deep ruddy red color. This is a classic style for Tsumeb. Measuring 9 x 9 x 4.3 cm, large speciments of tis nature are very rare.

Calcite is a carbonate mineral and the most stable polymorph of calcium carbonate. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness, based on scratch hardness comparison, defines value 3 as "calcite".

Calcite is a common constituent of sedimentary rocks, limestone in particular, much of which is formed from the shells of dead marine organisms. Approximately 10% of sedimentary rock is limestone. 


Other polymorphs of calcium carbonate are the minerals aragonite and vaterite. Aragonite will change to calcite over timescales of days or less at temperatures exceeding 300°C, and vaterite is even less stable.