The Most Important Jurassic Discovery Ever Made in the Arctic!

/PRNewswire/ -- On the remote archipelago of Svalbard, just 800 miles from the North Pole, a team of paleontologists has made a remarkable discovery. Led by Jorn Hurum from the University of Oslo Natural History Museum they have unearthed the fossilized remains of a huge sea creature from the distant past - which they believe is the most important Jurassic discovery ever made in the Arctic. PREDATOR X is the story of this major Arctic discovery of an entirely new species, 150 million years old. It is a new species of pliosaur, a massive and powerful marine predator estimated to be at least 50 feet long... weighing 45 tons - six times the weight of a Tyrannosaurus Rex - and with powerful jaws that killed with an amazing 33,000-pound bite - four times as powerful as a T Rex.

The two-hour special PREDATOR X premieres on HISTORY(TM) on Sunday, March 29 at 8pm ET/PT.

PREDATOR X follows Jorn Hurum and his team of paleontologists every step of the way, from field work through cutting edge research of this amazing dinosaur-age reptile - one of the most incredible Jurassic ocean discoveries in modern history.

Hurum and team member Patrick Druckenmiller, an Alaskan paleontologist and extreme adventurer, must excavate the find from the ice, transport it back to the lab and bring it back to life using advanced scientific techniques. They travel the globe breaking new ground to scientifically understand and recreate Predator X. Their results are astounding and only now can they fully understand the beast they unearthed. Analysis usually reserved for precision engineering of modern machines, reveals the secrets of Predator X. Their quest takes them from wind tunnels to CT scanners to bio-mechanic and robotic laboratories. In analyzing its body, delving into its brain and witnessing its hunting strategy, the team conclude that they have found a perfectly designed killing machine - the most terrifying beast to patrol the planet's oceans.

As a child, Dr. Hurum had visited the Oslo Natural History Museum, well known for its treasure trove of fossils, and gazed in awe at the fossilized flipper of a prehistoric sea predator. A quarter of a century later, Dr. Hurum was in Svalbard, one of the most inhospitable places on Earth, leading a team of paleontologists committed to finding what they all believed was there. Because of its extreme polar conditions, few paleontologists have ever explored Svalbard's fertile fossil hunting ground; and Dr. Hurum's group along with Dr. Druckenmiller are the first to document this diverse assembly of marine reptiles.

With modern forensic technology, Dr. Hurum and team work to unlock the secrets of the monster. CGI will help bring Predator X to life, in an environment like the one all those years ago. Its anatomy, physiology and hunting technique all point to it being the ultimate predator - the ferocious pliosaur they are calling Predator X. Pliosaurs were a short-necked form of plesiosaur, a group of extinct reptiles that inhabited the world's oceans in the age of dinosaurs. The team is able to determine that their find, Predator X, is indeed a new species based on its incredible size and bone morphology - specifically: the flipper bones, the breast plate, and the neck vertebrae.

Predator X is produced for History(TM) by Atlantic Productions. Executive Producer for Atlantic Productions is Anthony Geffen. Executive Producer for History is Dirk Hoogstra.

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World’s Largest Snake Discovered in Fossilized Rainforest

Sixty million years before Jennifer Lopez starred in the film “Anaconda,” the world’s biggest snake slithered around northern South America. Excavations in Colombia co-organized by Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History, unearthed fossil remains of a new snake species named Titanoboa cerrejonensis.

Surrounded by huge trucks extracting coal from Cerrejon, one of the world’s largest open-pit mines, researchers discovered fossilized bones of super-sized snakes and their prey, crocodiles and turtles, in the Cerrejon Formation, along with fossilized plant material from the oldest known rainforest in the Americas, which flourished at the site 58-60 million years ago.

Jason Head, the lead author of the new species description in the journal Nature, is a research associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Head, with David Polly, associate professor of geosciences at Indiana University, used the ratio between vertebral size and the length of existing snakes to estimate that this boa-like snake must have reached 13 meters (42 feet) in length and weighed more than a ton. Titanoboa, as it is now called, is the largest snake ever known, and was the largest non-marine vertebrate from the epoch immediately following the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago. “The discovery of Titanoboa challenges our understanding of past climates and environments, as well as the biological limitations on the evolution of giant snakes.” said Head “This shows how much more information about the history of Earth there is to glean from a resource like the reptile fossil record.”

Titanoboa’s size indicates that it lived in an environment where the average yearly temperature was 30-34 degrees Celsius. This estimate coincides with paleoclimatic models predicting greenhouse conditions. “This temperature estimate is much hotter than modern temperatures in tropical rainforests anywhere in the world. The fossil floras that the Smithsonian has been collecting in Cerrejon for many years indicate that the area was a tropical rainforest. That means that tropical rainforests could exist at temperatures 3-4 degrees Celsius hotter than modern tropical rainforests experience,” said Jaramillo.

Support for this research comes from the National Science Foundation, Fondo para Investigaciones del Banco de la Republica de Colombia, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Paleobiology Fund, the Florida Museum of Natural History, a Geological Society of America Graduate Student Research Grant and a National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grant and the Cerrejon Coal Mine.

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Little Teeth Suggest Big Jump in Primate Timeline

AAAG Note: Pretty cool find. Thought you'd be interested in this story from Duke University.

Tiny fossilized teeth excavated from an Indian open-pit coal mine could be the oldest Asian remains ever found of anthropoids, the primate lineage of today's monkeys, apes and humans, say researchers from Duke University and the Indian Institute of Technology.

Just 9-thousandths of a square inch in size, the teeth are about 54.5 million years old and suggest these early primates were no larger than modern dwarf lemurs weighing about 2 to 3 ounces. Studies of the shape of the teeth suggest these small animals could live on a fruit and insect diet, according to the researchers.

"It's certainly the oldest anthropoid from Asia and India," said Richard Kay, a Duke professor of evolutionary anthropology who is corresponding author of a report to be published online during the week of Aug. 4-8 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Previous fossil evidence shows primates were living in North America, Europe and Asia at least 55 million years ago. But, until now, the fossil record of anthropoid primates has extended back only 45 million years.

"We're going back almost 10 million years before any previously described Asian anthropoid," said co-author Blythe Williams, a Duke visiting associate professor of evolutionary anthropology. "The new fossils from India are exciting because they show that the anthropoid lineage is much more ancient than we realized."

In addition to stretching the primate timeline, the specimens represent a new genus as well as a new species of anthropoid, which the researchers have named Anthrasimias gujaratensis by drawing from the Greek word for "coal," Latin for "monkey" and the Indian State of Gujarat where the teeth were found.

"Anthrasimias may be the oldest anthropoid in the world," the PNAS report said -- "may" reflecting the fact that some scientists think slightly older fossils found in a Moroccan limestone deposit also could have been anthropoid, Kay said.

The report's first author is Sunil Bajpai, an earth scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology who directed excavations at the Vastan lignite coal mine in western India that unearthed the fossils.

Bajpai's Indian team managed to find and remove the tiny Anthrasimias tooth specimens from a strata in the mine while "really gigantic trucks" scooped up coal above them, Kay said. The teeth were dated by identifying microscopic marine plankton fossils of known age in nearby rock layers, he added.

Bajpai's team was funded by India's Department of Science and Technology. Work by Williams and Kay, who are anthropoid experts, was funded the Duke Provost's Research Fund and the National Science Foundation.

Their PNAS report describes tooth structure differences that would separate Anthrasimias from two other ancient lines of primates whose remains have been found at the same level of the Vastan mine. Of the three lines, Williams and Kay believe only Anthrasimias's is part of the anthropoid lineage that evolved into modern monkeys, apes and humans.

"Most of the fossil record of ancient primates is made up of teeth, because teeth are easy to preserve and hard," Williams said. "Occasionally we get lucky enough to have a skull to work with, but in this case a few teeth is all we have." Their PNAS report described two upper molars and one lower molar.

"From the tooth size and structure we can say something about the animals' body weight and diet, because teeth have crests that are differentially developed depending on whether they ate primarily insects, leaves or fruit," he said. But without more body parts, Kay and Williams declined to deduce what the animals looked like.

Other authors of the PNAS report were Debasis Das of the Indian Institute of Technology, Vivesh Kapur of Chandigarh, India, and B.N. Tiwari of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology in India.

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