X-rays reveal complete dino skeleton

Scientists have used high-power X-rays to "see inside" an exquisite and complete dinosaur specimen.

The skeleton belongs to a small, plant-eating dinosaur which lived 200 million years ago - at the beginning of the Jurassic Period.

Although this species was widespread at the time, scientists have largely had to rely on incomplete fossils.

The analysis was carried out at the ESRF facility in Grenoble, France, and showed that the specimen was juvenile.

The skeleton is too small and fragile, and the rocks around it too hard, to allow it to be studied by conventional means.

In addition, the rock matrix in which the fossil is preserved contains trapped minerals which prevented it from being scanned in a standard CT scanner.

The specimen was discovered in a stream bed on a farm in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa by palaeontologist Billy de Klerk.

"There's still a lot we don't know about early plant-eating dinosaurs," said Prof Jonah Choiniere from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"We need new specimens like this one and new technology like the synchrotron to fill in those gaps."

Prof Choiniere, along with Dr Vincent Fernandez, from the ESRF (European Synchrotron), scanned the specimen with high-powered X-rays to understand how the species, Heterodontosaurus tucki, ate, moved, and breathed.

Read on … 

U.S. sues to return Tyrannosaurus skeleton to Mongolia

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. authorities filed a lawsuit seeking to return to Mongolia a 70-million-year-old piece of its cultural heritage - fangs and all.

The skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar - a smaller Asian cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex - has been the subject of a months-long legal battle and is now being sought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who announced the federal government's lawsuit on Monday.

Bharara seeks the forfeiture of the skeleton from Heritage Auctions of Texas, the auction company that sold it for more than $1 million last month to an undisclosed buyer, Bharara said in a statement. He vowed to return the skeleton to Mongolia, where it was originally "looted from the Gobi Desert."

"A piece of the country's natural history was stolen with it, and we look forward to returning it to its rightful place," Bharara said.

Mongolia's President Tsakhia Elbegdorj thanked U.S. authorities for stepping into the dispute, saying in a statement "an important piece of the cultural heritage of the Mongolian people" had been recovered.

The dinosaur skeleton was discovered in 1946 during a joint Soviet-Mongolian expedition to the Gobi Desert in the Omnogovi Province, Bharara said. Since 1924, Mongolia has enacted laws declaring dinosaur fossils to be the property of the government, criminalizing their export.

Last month, Dallas-based Heritage Auctions agreed to help the Mongolian government investigate the ownership of the skeleton, which was auctioned in New York in May. A state district judge in Dallas granted the Mongolian government a temporary restraining order to prevent the transfer of ownership until it was determined whether it was illegally obtained from Mongolia.

On June 5, at the request of Mongolia's president, several paleontologists specializing in the species examined the skeleton and concluded it was a Tyrannosaurus bataar unearthed from the western Gobi Desert in Mongolia between 1995 and 2005.

(Reporting by Joseph O'Leary; Editing by Barbara Goldberg and Christopher Wilson)

Feds to Seize $1.1 Million Dinosaur on Friday

Federal officials have plans to seize a dinosaur skeleton that paleontologists and Mongolian officials say was taken illegally from that country.

Yesterday, a federal judge signed a warrant allowing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations (ICE HSI) to seize the fossils, which belong to a 8-foot tall and 24-foot long (2.4-by-7.3 meter)Tarbosaurus bataar skeleton. 

Officials plan to collect the dinosaur on Friday from the facility where auction house Heritage Auctions has been storing it in Sunnyside, N.Y.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/21079-dinosaur-seizure-mongolia.html

Protoceratops Dinosaur found with its own tracks

A fossil housed for half a century in a Polish museum has turned out to be the first dinosaur skeleton preserved in its own tracks, say scientists.

A recent examination of the 80-million-year-old specimen revealed a single footprint preserved in the rocks encasing the fossilised bones.

Polish and Mongolian fossil hunters first unearthed it in 1965 in Mongolia.

Scientists now report the results of its re-examination in the journal Cretaceous Research.

The dinosaur is a Protoceratops, and since this is one of the most common dinosaurs found in the rich fossil beds of the Gobi Desert, it was not deemed to be very significant. But the scientists say it is the first example of a dinosaur being preserved with its own footprints.

Polish palaeontologists Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and Tomasz Singer spotted the footprint while they were preparing the fossil for display at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

His colleague, University of Colorado at Denver geologist Martin Lockley, told BBC Nature that this really was "a first".

"Generally, we find it very hard even to match dinosaurs with their footprints at the species level," he explained.

"We have a couple of examples in the literature where we say, 'we're almost certain that this footprint belongs to this species', but this is an animal actually dead in its tracks."

A single, preserved footprint can be seen in the rocks encasing the fossil. Prof Lockley suggests that some of the rock discarded when scientists prepare dinosaur skeletons could contain ancient clues about the lives of the extinct beasts.

"Traditionally, palaeontologists look for nice skeletons, and in order to get those out of the rock, they're discarding the matrix. So lots of tracks have been overlooked."

Splitting sediments

Since the 1990s, and with some spectacular fossil footprint discoveries from China, research into dinosaur tracks has received much more attention.

But the deposits that often contain trackways have not been the same as those that contain skeletons, as Dr Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist from London's Natural History Museum explained.

"Whereas trackways usually come from beach deposits, bones are normally found in river channels, where perhaps the animals drowned and were quickly buried and preserved," Dr Barrett told BBC Nature.

"So this discovery is a neat one-off."

"Unfortunately, though," he added, "this doesn't solve any other dinosaur mysteries for us; it doesn't help us to match another species to its footprints."

Prof Lockley hopes that it will make dinosaur hunters pay more attention to the footprints they might be missing.

"Since this part of Mongolia was desert during the Cretaceous period, it's not thought to be ideal for finding tracks," he said.

"But I think a lot of these dinosaurs could have been caught in flash flooding. They could have been buried in their nests - just hunkered down. And if you want to become a fossil, you need to get buried quickly."

There may be lots more of these types of discoveries yet to be made.

"This shows that some things don't come to light unless you're looking for them," Prof Lockley told BBC Nature. "This discovery is a very small inroad into a very big gap."

He said that studying tracks was crucial to learning more about dinosaur behaviour.

"When palaeontologists deal with skeletons, they're dealing with death and decay," he said.

"But with tracks you can tell how much it weighed, how it moved, if it was running or walking. You can even tell if it was limping.

"With tracks you're dealing with the living animals."

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/14900975