Science

The famous pterosaurs, flying reptiles such immense, not expected to be ripe for sex, according to a new study paleontology.

Apparently were the same as their cousins the dinosaurs, and now reproduced as youngsters.

Paleontologists study analyzed hundreds of bones from an extinct species of flying reptiles, the Pterodaustro guinazui discovered in Argentina in the 1990s. The fossils come from various individuals, including an embryo inside an egg and adults with wings wide ranging from 30 cm to 2.5 meters.

Fr guinazui lived about 100 million years ago during the Cretaceous. "It's amazing that after millions of years, the microscopic structures of the bones remain intact, said Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, paleobiologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, author of the study. The bones have rings like trees, as to meet growth.

The team of paleontologists discovered that the pterosaurs reached 50% of adult size in just two years. At that point the flying reptiles were already sexually mature, and growth continued slowly for three or four years.

"Then they stopped growing and may not live much longer," said Argentine paleontologist Luis Chiappe, a coauthor of the study and director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

Most interesting, no doubt, that did not grow throughout their lives, like the dinosaurs, and as do turtles and crocodiles of today. And that growth is faster at the beginning was to allow safe reproduction, indicating that they did not live long, as noted above.

Source: National Geographic (image)

Last year a meteorite made a hole in almost every newspaper in the world. It was September when he fell from space and crashed through the atmosphere to land in Peru, in view of witnesses totally absorbed. It was the first time that witnesses were able to witness how a crater formed in vivo.

But the reports of witnesses, and analysis of geologists then, they amazed the scientists. This meteorite seemed to have flown much faster than scientists thought possible for such objects, and apparently survived his entry to Earth intact, instead of breaking apart as experts believed should have happened.

"Many people thought this was a hoax," he told LiveScience Peter Schultz, Brown University geólogode who traveled to Peru to examine the crater. "It made sense with what we understand about collisions with such fragile rocks. It is usually this kind of rock are broken into pieces during its passage through the atmosphere, which did not happen with this.

But Schultz was to investigate the impact, along with Peruvian scientists. There he found a crater 16 meters wide near a village called Carancas. He fractured lines in sand grains and compressed mixtures of earth and meteorite. All this enabled him to calculate that the meteorite landed at a speed of 9300 mph.

The meteorite itself was fairly common rock type. Usually this type is usually slow down the friction with the atmosphere it produces, then when it reaches land produces only one hole, not a crater, and less than 16 meters wide.

The mystery is why did not diminish his speed, says Schultz. Some theories say that perhaps while traveling in the atmosphere are melted and transformed, making it more aerodynamic, and thus suffered less friction, then it broke, and his speed has not diminished.

But the mystery is why it does not happen with other meteorites. Maybe the angle of entry into the atmosphere, Schultz speculates, but for now follow the Peruvian mystery crater.

Via Space.com

Image

German scientists issued a landmark discovery in the era of the dinosaurs: feathers perfectly preserved in amber.

Feathers, found in western France, are older than 100 million years, and have characteristics similar to those found in fiber type feathers some theropod dinosaurs, also resemble those of modern birds.

According to the director of the team of paleontologists, Vincent Perrichot, Museum für Naturkunde-Berlin in Germany, ests feathers help the research on how dinosaurs gave way to birds. Since you can see the passage of the original strands of what would later become modern feathers.

They have not been able to verify who owns the feathers, as they were not associated with any fossil remains, so do not know if they were from a dinosaur or a bird. Although the layer above the rock containing the amber, they could dig your teeth from two families of dinosaurs from which it is believed that they had feathers.

So Perrichot concludes that "it is entirely plausible that the feathers were of dinosaurs, not birds."

The feathers are primitive traits, the researchers said, the birds of today could not fly with those of 100 million years ago. What helps the theory that feathers evolved first dinosaurs could not fly, who made use of them to generate internal heat and the isolation that they provide, almost as if the Penguins.

Source: National Geographic (Image)

One of the cultures of our historical past that women had more features, were the Vikings. The Viking women had a status that no other woman had the time and only succeeded in more recent periods.

Now, thanks to a new archaeological discovery is also known very well dressed, but he did it provocatively. They used imported silk gowns adorned with metallic bras.

The wardrobe of a Viking grave was discovered in a 10th-century Russia. Where the Vikings came before the area was Christianized.

"Now we can say that the way to dress before the Christian era was very rich," said Annika Larsson, who studied the clothing, of Uppsala University in Sweden. "When Christianity came, the dress of the women began to look like nuns. There was a big difference."

What reveals this tomb is that women from the Viking era, ranging from about 750 to about 1050, must have been very sexy. And is that the Vikings had opened trade routes that reached China, and when its was over, also the trade routes were closed and left to reach luxury.

Larsson descubrión blue silk dress with ornaments, in a tomb of the Pskov region in Russia. It was near Novgorod, a major Viking cities of the region. According to Larsson was placed in a way that makes one believe that it would be a gift to the deceased used it in the afterlife.

"It's easy to imagine," says, "that the Christian Church have had reservations about a way of dressing that emphasized both the breasts."

Source ScienceDaly

Image: Science Daly