Two New Meat Eaters Discovered

New meat-eating dinos identified

Two previously unknown types of meat-eating dinosaur have been identified from fossils unearthed in the Sahara desert in Niger.

The new carnivore fossils have been described by a researcher from the University of Bristol working with palaeontologists from the US.

One of the dinosaurs probably scavenged its prey like a hyena, the other probably hunted live animals.

Details appear in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

The fossilised remains of two 110-million-year-old carnivorous dinosaurs were found along the western edge of the Tenere Desert in Niger by Dr Paul Sereno, from the University of Chicago, eight years ago.

"They are the earliest records of both major carnivore groups that would go on to dominate Africa, South America, and India during the next 50 million years, in the Cretaceous Period," said co-author Steve Brusatte, from the University of Bristol.

Hidden face

One of the creatures was about 8m (25ft) in length and sported a short snout with a horny covering. It has been named Kryptops palaios or "old hidden face".

Kryptops may have scavenged food in a manner similar to a hyena.

Like later members of its dinosaur group - known as the abelisaurids - in South America and India, it had short, armoured jaws and small teeth, well designed for gobbling guts and gnawing carcasses.

The other discovery is of a similar-sized contemporary called Eocarcharia dinops or "fierce-eyed dawn shark".

It possessed blade-shaped teeth and a prominent bony eyebrow ridge. Unlike Kryptops, its teeth were more suited to attacking live prey and severing body parts.

The Carcharodontosaurids, the group to which Eocarcharia belongs, included predators as big, if not bigger, than Tyrannosaurus rex.

A swollen bony brow over Eocarcharia's eye gave it a menacing appearance and may have been used as a battering ram against rivals for mating rights, say the researchers.

These two meat eaters were contemporaries of another carnivorous dinosaur which is known from the same area: Suchomimus, a large fish-eating theropod.

"It is clear from their anatomy that they were eating different things: Suchomimus ate fish, Kryptops ate smaller animals and Eocarcharia was the top predator of its day," said Mr Brusatte.

"Just like in the African savannah today, lions, cheetahs and hyenas must eat different food to survive side by side. It is fascinating to see this in a 110-million-year-old ecosystem."

As I have stated numerous times before, "here we go again, brand new meat eating species that was heretofore not known". I am telling YOU people, there is and was stuff here on this planet that we have no clue about yet. All YOU folks that want to sit around and talk about what doesn't exist, YOU need to check yourself. Or, "opyn your mindz".

Where's Godzilla & Shang,

Bobby Sharpe Dragon, Book of Shang www.myspace.com/akuasharpe

Dragons, Dinosaurs & The Bible

Dragon Stories

In fact, there are many such stories, from all over the world. One of the oldest is of Gilgamesh, hero of an ancient Babylonian epic, who killed a huge reptile-like creature named Khumbaba, in a cedar forest. The early Britons provide the first European accounts of reptilian monsters, one of which killed and devoured King Morvidus of Wales, c. 336 BC. Another monarch, King Peredur, however, managed to slay his monster at a place called Llyn Llion, in Wales.

The epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf tells how Beowulf (c. AD 495-583) of Scandinavia killed a monster named Grendel, and its supposed mother, as well as several sea-reptiles, but eventually lost his life at the age of 88 in the process of killing a flying reptile. The Saxon description of this creature fits that of a giant Pteranodon—it was ‘fifty feet in length (or possibly wingspan)’. The monster called Grendel, which Beowulf killed many years previously, is described as follows. He was apparently a youngster (having been known for only 12 years), man-like in stance (i.e. bipedal), and he had two small forelimbs that the Saxons call eorms (arms), one of which Beowulf tore off. He was a muthbona --one who slew with his mouth or jaws -and his skin was impervious to swordblows.

Other well-known stories involving medieval heroes and dragons include Siegfried of the ancient Teutons (possibly the same person as Sigurd of Old Norse, who slew a monster named Fafnir), Tristan (or Tristram), King Arthur, and Sir Lancelot, of Britain, and perhaps the most famous of all, St George who became the patron saint of England. (The film and video The Great Dinosaur Mystery details many more of these accounts besides those listed here.)

The dragon ensign was used by many armies. Under the later eastern Roman emperors, the purple-dragon ensign became the ceremonial standard, called the drakonteion. In England, before the Norman Conquest in 1066, the dragon was chief among the royal ensigns in war, having been instituted by Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur. Other kings who used the dragon ensign were Richard I, in 1191, when on crusade, and Henry III, in 1245, when he went to war against the Welsh.

In China, the dragon appears as the national symbol and the badge of the royal family, and the dragon adorned the Chinese flag until the founding of the Republic of China, in 1911.

Although doubtless over the years many of these dragon stories and drawings have gained embellishments, the fact of their virtual worldwide existence, and the many items of similarity between the creatures slain and known dinosaur fossils, clearly point to an underlying reality. Modern children’s story books about dragons invariably have drawings of fairy-tale creatures, but according to Paul Taylor, who has done extensive research on this issue, many (perhaps most) of the historical dragon stories do not have this imaginative element; usually the more ancient stories are more matter-of-fact in quality, while the more recent ones tend to be more fantastic. One explanation of this could be that as the evidence in the form of the dinosaurs became extinct, the storytellers felt free to make their stories more marvellous and to combine the features of several dragons into one.

One thing that we might reasonably expect, if God created the dinosaurs on Day Six of Creation Week, is that they would be mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.

Dinosaurs in the Bible

In fact, two such animals are described in the book of Job. The first is a giant vegetarian animal that may be either a Diplodocus or a Brachiosaurus: ‘Behold now behemoth which I made with thee; he eateth grass like an ox... He moveth his tail like a cedar... his bones are like bars of iron, he drinketh up a river’ (Job 40:15-24). The second appears to have been some sort of large fire-breathing animal. Just as the small bombardier beetle has an explosion-producing mechanism, so the great sea-dragon may have had an explosion-producing mechanism to enable it to be a real fire breathing dragon: ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook.. his breath kindleth coals and a flame goeth out of his mouth... .’ (Job 41:1-34).

It is also interesting that in the King James version of the Bible the term ‘dragon(s)’ is used more than 20 times in the Old Testament, once metaphorically, referring to the Pharaoh King of Egypt as a dragon (Ezekiel 29:3), and the other times referring to animals; for example, ‘ ... the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under foot’ (Psalm 91:13), ‘And I will make Jerusalem heaps and a den of dragons ... ’ (Jeremiah 9:11).

This has special significance when it is realized that the KJV was published in the year AD 1611; that is to say, less then four centuries ago, the translators of the Bible were happy to use the term ‘dragon’, confident that its use would be meaningful and not mythical for the readers.

This article and compilation of creationists takes on dragons and or dinosaurs, makes for a fascinating read. It also leaves room for various interpretations. All open to individual scrutiny, none to be dismissed. It's your call!

Dragons Ruled/Rule,

Bobby Sharpe "Dragon, Book Of Shang": "NEW" Sneak Peek "Dragon, Book Of Shang" www.myspace.com/akuasharpe

Beetles & Dinosaurs

Modern Beetles Predate Dinosaurs

Wait, don't squash that beetle! Its lineage predates dinosaurs.

New research hints that modern-day versions of the insects are far older than any tyrannosaur that trod the Earth.

Today's plethora of beetle species were thought to have blossomed 140 million years ago, during the rise of flowering plants. But the new study of beetle DNA and fossils, published in the Dec. 21 issue of the journal Science, pushes their appearance back to 300 million years ago.

That beats the arrival of dinosaurs by about 70 million years.

"Unlike the dinosaurs which dwindled to extinction, beetles survived because of their ecological diversity and adaptability," said the study's lead scientist Alfried Vogler, an entomologist at Imperial College London and the Natural History Museum in London.

Today, 350,000 species of beetles dot collections around the world, and millions more are estimated to exist but haven't been discovered — which means they make up more than one-fourth of all known species of life forms. The reason for this tremendous diversity has been debated by scientists for many years but never resolved.

Vogler thinks beetles' head start on our planet with its ever-changing environments was the secret to their success.

"The large number of beetle species existing today could very well be a direct result of this early evolution," Vogler said, "and the fact that there has been a very high rate of survival and continuous diversification of many lineages since then."

To reach this conclusion, Vogler and his team teased out evolutionary data from the DNA of 1,880 modern beetle species, then compared it to fossil records dating back 265 million years to build detailed evolutionary trees. The new genetic maps suggest that a common ancestor to beetles crept up well before its descendants showed up in the fossil record.

"With beetles forming such a large proportion of all known species, learning about their relationships and evolution gives us important new insights into the origin of biodiversity and how beetles have triumphed over the course of nearly 300 million years," Vogler said.

See, the bugs/insects got it going on. Size doesn't really matter now does it?

Animalz & insects Rule,

Bobby Sharpe Dragon, Book of Shang www.myspace.com/akuasharpe

Another NEW Dinosaur Discovered

New Dinosaur Discovered in Antarctica

(Dec. 11) - A hefty, long-necked dinosaur that lumbered across the Antarctic before meeting its demise 190 million years ago has been identified and named, more than a decade after intrepid paleontologists sawed and chiseled the remains of the primitive plant-eater from its icy grave.

A team led by William Hammer of Augustana College had unearthed the dino fossils in the early 1990s. They found a partial foot, leg and ankle bones on Mt. Kirkpatrick near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet (nearly 4,000 meters). It wasn't until recently, though, that researchers examined the fossils.

"The fossils were painstakingly removed from the ice and rock using jackhammers, rock saws and chisels under extremely difficult conditions over the course of two field seasons," said Nathan Smith, a graduate student at The Field Museum in Chicago, who along with a colleague describes the dinosaur in the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Extreme Dinos

The Antarctic dinosaur was about 20 to 25 feet long (six to about 8 meters) and weighed in at 4 to 6 tons. Smith and co-author Diego Pol, a paleontologist at the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio in Argentina, determined the remains belong to a new genus and species of dinosaur from the early Jurassic Period.

Dubbed Glacialisaurus hammeri, the beast was a type of sauropodomorph, a dino group that includes the largest animals ever to walk the earth. Their sister group is the theropods, which include Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptor and primitive birds. The sauropodomorphs were long-necked herbivores and included the "true sauropods" Diplodocus and Apatosaurus (sauropods are a subset of sauropodomorphs).

While researchers don't know how G. hammeri used its tail, some of its relatives are thought to have wielded their tails as weapons, cracking the tail at supersonic speeds to produce a ground-shaking boom.

Dinosaur Sprawl

The new results suggest sauropodomorphs were widely distributed in the Early Jurassic—not only in China, South Africa, South America and North America, but also in Antarctica.

"This was probably due to the fact that major connections between the continents still existed at that time, and because climates were more equitable across latitudes than they are today," Smith said.

Back then, most of the landmasses in today's southern hemisphere (including Antarctica, South America, Africa and Australia) formed the supercontinent Gondwana. The landmass started to break up in the mid-Jurassic, about 167 million years ago.

The Glacialisaurus discovery, along with that of a possible sauropod at roughly the same location in Antarctica, lends additional support to a theory that the earliest sauropods coexisted with their more primitive sauropodomorph cousins for an extended period, the researchers conclude.

"They are important because they help to establish that primitive sauropodomorph dinosaurs were more broadly distributed than previously thought, and that they coexisted with their cousins, the true sauropods," Smith said.

Other animal remains that have been collected in the neighborhood of G. hammeri include a nearly complete skeleton of a theropod dinosaur called Cryolophosaurus ellioti; pelvic bones from a possible sauropod dinosaur; a pterosaur humerus bone; and the tooth of a large tritylodont (a type of extinct mammal relatives).

I am not exactly sure what is going on these days, but, it seems like for the last couple of years now, a new species of animal or new dinosaur is being discovered almost every few weeks or so. I have my theories, but, can't prove a thing and they are only speculation as of now.

As I have told many of YOU before, "it is just a matter of time before they find Godzilla or, at least a once alive close relative". Yes, and they will eventually prove that dragons are not just some "fantasy" creature.

Animalz Rule(Dinosaurs),

Bobby Sharpe Dragon, Book of Shang www.myspace.com/akuasharpe