Dragons

One of the most universal monster myths is that of the dragon. The awesome, reptile-like beasts appear in the folklore of nearly every country. And the fact that the creature was truly regarded as an actual monster rather than a myth can be demonstrated in several writings of the day. Edward Topsell, writing in his Historie of Serpents (1608), commented that among all the kinds of serpents, there is none comparable to the Dragon, or that afforded and yielded “so much plentiful matter in history for the ample discovery of the nature thereof.”

While examining the “true accounts” of dragons in the folklore and records of several cultures, one cannot help wondering if there really were dragon-like monsters prowling the earth, devouring hapless villagers, receiving periodic sacrifices of young maidens, spreading terror into the hearts of all, and being thwarted only by courageous knights. For years, children have been read tales, seen motion pictures, and heard songs of reluctant dragons, kindly dragons, affectionate dragons, magic dragons, and timid dragons.

Behind every myth smolders some spark of truth and reality. A few scientists hold the theory that a number of dinosaurs might have survived into the Age of Man. Pick up any book on dinosaurs and it is apparent that a Tyrannosaurus Rex would have made a terrific dragon in anyone’s legend. Such a huge reptile thudding about the countryside of early Europe or Asia could certainly fit even the most dramatic descriptions of a dragon.

No theorist favoring the surviving dinosaur solution to dragons claims that the great reptiles existed in anything approaching abundance. But even a handful of such ancient monsters existing in isolated lakes and forested valleys would not have gone unnoticed, even in the sparsely populated Europe of the Dark Ages. The discovery of even just a few of these great reptiles would have given rise to a far-reaching legend.

A more palatable theory is that the ancient historians were actually describing huge snakes such as the python, which often reaches a length of more than 30 feet. A number of dragon stories from the Middle Ages tell how the dragon wound itself about its prey and slowly crushed it.

The giant snake theory does not account for descriptions of the dragon’s feet or its ability to walk on all fours, but some species of giant lizard, such as the Komodo dragon, attains a length of 10–12 feet. The Komodo presently resides in the East Indies, but in ancient times, it is possible that St. George and his fellow dragon-killers might have fought some unknown species of monster lizard in Europe and Asia.

A third, more believable theory has an adventurer of the Middle Ages coming upon a cave filled with the bones of a giant cave bear and mistaking them for the skeletal remains of a dragon. Workmen excavating earth for a cathedral might even have unearthed the fossil remains of a dinosaur. It was not until the nineteenth century that scientists realized that the age of fossil bones often ran into millions of years. Previously, the skeletons were considered to have been the remains of some giant creature only recently dead. If, at the time the dragon legend was flourishing in Europe, a discovery of fossil remains was unearthed or sighted in a cave, the find would seem to offer conclusive proof for the existence of dragons. It is likely that the bones of the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the giant cave bear were not that uncommon in early Europe. The tusk of the mammoth was often called for in the recipes of medieval love potions.

In the marketplace of the Austrian city of Klagenfurt, there is a statue of a giant killing a dragon. The dragon’s head has quite obviously been modeled on the skull of a woolly rhinoceros. The connection can be proven by the fact that old records note the discovery of a “dragon’s skull” in Klagenfurt in the sixteenth century, 30 years before the statue was constructed. The skull has been preserved all these years by the city fathers and can be identified today as that of the Ice Age rhinoceros.

Delving Deeper

Carrington, Richard. Mermaids and Mastodons. London: Arrow Books, 1960.

Heuvelmans, Bernard. On the Track of Unknown Animals. New York: Hill and Wang, 1958.

Mackal, Roy P. A Living Dinosaur? In Search of Mokele-Mbembe. New York: E. J. Brill, 1987.

Study helps dinosaurs shed the kilos

The discovery may change the way we imagine and depict dinosaurs (Source: Andrew Howe/iStockphoto)

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News

Dinosaurs were often hefty, but not as plump as previously thought, a finding that could forever change museum exhibits, book illustrations, and other recreations of these now-extinct species

A new study, which appears in the latest issue of Royal Society Biology Letters, describes a new technique used to measure the weight and size of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals.
"This is a huge help for any sort of reconstruction," says lead author William Sellers. "We now have a number that suggests how much flesh to add to the bones and that should help people produce animals that are the right balance of too fat or too thin."
"This technique can also allow you to calculate the numbers you need for more sophisticated locomotor reconstructions, such as the running simulations we have produced in the past," says Sellers, who is based at the University of Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences.
He and his team used lasers to measure the minimum amount of skin required to wrap around the skeletons of large modern animals that included reindeer, polar bears, giraffes and elephants. Doing this, the researchers noticed that the animals had almost exactly 21 per cent more body mass than the minimum skeletal "skin and bone" wrap volume.
The formula was then applied to a giant Brachiosaur skeleton housed at Berlin's Museum für Naturkunde. Previous estimates of this dinosaur's weight have been as high as 80 tonne. This latest study, however, reduces the figure to just 23 tonnes - impressively weighty, but not nearly as heavy.

Improved measuring techniques

"The 23 tonne weight is quite low, but I think it reflects the fact that all dinosaur weights are getting lower," says Sellers, explaining that the estimated weight for this dino, along with other species, has been dropping since about the early 1960's.
He says that the new estimate "reflects a better understanding of biology, and I think the early estimates were set in that big, fat and slow lizard mindset before the dinosaur renaissance. I think we will find that the lower estimates are much more appropriate for many dinosaurs."
High-tech scanners, fast computers and other tools were simply not available back in the day when dinosaur weights were first estimated. Up until fairly recently, even experts resorted to some fairly homespun methods for attempting to calculate dinosaur heft.
"One very common method is to take an artist's reconstruction sculpture of the animal and measure its volume by dipping it in water just like Archimedes," says Sellers. "That gives you the volumes, which you can multiply by the density to get its weight."
"The problem with this is the artist's reconstruction," he says. "These are very time consuming to do and probably rather inaccurate, so we thought we'd try a new method."

Limitations

Aside from improved accuracy, the new method is minimally invasive and relatively quick. The primary limitation, for now, is that the specimen should consist of a complete skeleton that has been mounted.
"This is reasonably accurate because the bones fit together like a jigsaw puzzle," he says.
Heinrich Mallison of the Museum für Naturkunde says the new study describes "a brilliant approach: not trying to estimate soft tissues, but finding out how much a bone-only model underestimates the entire animal's mass."
Mallison thinks it is "certainly a very good method for mammals, but I'd like to see tests with more details to find out if archosaurs (crocodiles and dinosaurs) have the same regressions, or differ."

T. rex was bigger than thought: study

The eye of a Tyrannosaurus rex replica named Kokoro is pictured during a media preview of the "Playing with Dinosaurs" exhibition at the National Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall in Taipei(Source: Nicky Loh /Reuters)


 The iconic T. rex dinosaur grew bigger and faster than previously estimated, according to British and US scientists.
Scientists digitally modelled flesh on five mounted T. rex skeletons and showed that the meat-eating lizard kings were up to a third bigger and grew two times as fast into adults than previous research had suggested.
The findings, led by Professor John Hutchinson of The Royal Veterinary College, London, and Peter Makovicky, curator of dinosaurs at The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, are published in the journal PloS One .
One of the skeletons included in the study was "Sue", the largest and most complete T. rex specimen ever found, on display at The Field Museum.
The 67-million-year-old dinosaur was discovered in 1990 on an Indian reservation in South Dakota by American palaeontologist Sue Hendrickson.
Named after its finder, Sue was previously thought to be about the size of a big elephant or rhinoceros, standing 3.5 metres high and 13 metres from head to tail.
Her living weight was guessed to be 6400 kilograms, or about six and a half tonnes.
But the latest methods found she would have tipped the scales at well over nine tonnes.
"We knew she was big but the 30 per cent increase in her weight was unexpected," says Makovicky.

Using digital models

The technique used mounted skeletons to derive body mass estimates, instead of models created to scale.The team made three-dimensional laser scans of the skeletons to form a template for digital models that would add simulated flesh.
They devised three different levels of the approximate amount of flesh the creatures likely had, to figure the size of a thin, hungry animal up to a well-fed one.
"Previous methods for calculating mass relied on scale models, which can magnify even minor errors, or on extrapolations from living animals with very different body plans from dinosaurs," says Makovicky.
"We overcame such problems by using the actual skeletons as a starting point for our study."
By establishing new sizes for the other four specimens studied, the researchers also found that the creatures likely grew faster than initially thought.
"We estimate they grew as fast as 1790 kilograms per year during the teenage period of growth, which is more than twice the previous estimate," says lead author Hutchinson.
That would mean the land-roaming carnivores expanded by about 5 kilograms per day during their peak growth spurt, more than double their 2004 estimate of 2.1 kilograms per day.

AFP

Cambrian-Ordovician Extinction

During the Cambrian period, life flourished. The Edicaran life had remained largely unchanged for millions of years, but in the Cambrian it suddenly diversified and evolved into endless new forms. Exotic crustaceans and trilobites became the dominant life in their huge numbers and variety. Shellfish and giant aquatic arthropods, similar to insects, filled the seas. These creatures had rigid exoskeletons which left a bounty of fossils for us to study. Life flourished until, rather suddenly in geological terms, over 40% of all species suddenly became extinct 488 million years ago. Those that remained survived poorly at best due to some harsh change in the environment. What this change was we do not know. One theory is that a glaciation occurred, the coldest part of an ice age. We have been enjoying an interglacial period, the warmest part of an ice age, for the past eleven thousand years. An extreme change in temperature can easily cause the extinction of a huge amount of life. This extinction event marked the border between the Cambrian and Ordovician periods.

End-Ediacaran Extinction

During the Ediacaran period, complex life had begun to take form for the first time on Earth. Tiny bacteria had evolved into the more complex and specialized Eukaryotes, some of which grouped together to increase their chances of finding food and avoiding becoming food. Most of these odd creatures did not leave a record because they had no skeletons; they were soft and tended to rot when they died rather than fossilize. Only in peculiar circumstances could fossils form, such as a creature lying on soft mud which suddenly hardened and left an imprint. These few fossils tell us of seas full of strange and alien creatures who resembled modern worms, sponges, and jellies. However, these creatures were dependent upon oxygen, as are we. The oxygen levels began to fall and world-wide extinctions occurred 542 million years ago. Over 50% of all species died. The huge numbers of dead creatures decomposed and make up some of today’s fossil fuels. The exact cause of the lowering oxygen levels is unknown, however, this mass extinction made room for the Cambrian explosion, a sudden diversifying of complex creatures beyond mere worms.

Genetic Evidence of Geographical Groups among Neanderthals

The Neanderthals are a well-distinguished Middle Pleistocene population which inhabited a vast geographical area extending from Europe to western Asia and the Middle East. Since the 1950s paleoanthropological studies have suggested variability in this group. Different sub-groups have been identified in western Europe, in southern Europe and in the Middle East. On the other hand, since 1997, research has been published in paleogenetics, carried out on 15 mtDNA sequences from 12 Neanderthals. In this paper we used a new methodology derived from different bioinformatic models based on data from genetics, demography and paleoanthropology. The adequacy of each model was measured by comparisons between simulated results (obtained by BayesianSSC software) and those estimated from nucleotide sequences (obtained by DNAsp4 software). The conclusions of this study are consistent with existing paleoanthropological research and show that Neanderthals can be divided into at least three groups: one in western Europe, a second in the Southern area and a third in western Asia. Moreover, it seems from our results that the size of the Neanderthal population was not constant and that some migration occurred among the demes.

American Museum of Natural History - Mythic Creatures

The world is full of stories about brave heroes, magical events and fantastic beings. For thousands of years, humans everywhere—sometimes inspired by living animals or even fossils—have brought mythic creatures to life in stories, songs and works of art. Today these creatures, from the powerful dragon to the soaring phoenix, continue to thrill, terrify, entertain and inspire us. We seem to catch glimpses of these creatures all around us: hiding beneath the ocean waves, running silently through the forest and soaring among the clouds. Some symbolize danger. Others, we think, can bring us luck or joy. Together mythic creatures give shape to humankind's greater...

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