Gizmorama - October 15th, 2012
Good Morning,When you read a headline that says, "Prehistoric spider attack frozen in time," your imagination begins to run wild - at least mine did. You can't make stuff like this up.
Learn about this and other interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.
Until Next Time,
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Visit and Enjoy: EVTV1.com****-- Prehistoric spider attack frozen in time --*CORVALLIS, Ore. - U.S. researchers have found what they say is the only fossil ever discovered of a spider attacking prey caught in its web, a 100 million-year-old "snapshot." In an engagement frozen in time, the extraordinarily rare fossils of the spider and its prey, a wasp, are entombed in a piece of amber, Oregon State University reported Monday. "This juvenile spider was going to make a meal out of a tiny parasitic wasp, but never quite got to it," said OSU zoology Professor George Poinar Jr., a world expert on insects trapped in amber. "This was a male wasp that suddenly found itself trapped in a spider web," Poinar said. "This was the wasp's worst nightmare, and it never ended. The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked, when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them." An actual attack by a spider on its prey caught in a web has never before been documented as a fossil, the researchers said. Both the spider and the wasp belong to species that are now extinct, they said.
*-- Duckbill dinosaurs called 'super-grazers' --*NEW YORK - Duckbill dinosaurs had plant-pulverizing teeth more advanced than even cows, horses and other well-known modern grazers, U.S. paleontologists say. In the first study to ever recover material properties from fossilized teeth, scientists examined the jaws of duckbill dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, which were the dominant plant-eaters in the Late Cretaceous about 85 million years ago, the American Museum of Natural History reported. They discovered hadrosaurids actually had six types of dental tissues -- four more than reptiles and two more than modern expert mammal grinders such as horses, cows and elephants. "We were stunned to find that the mechanical properties of the teeth were preserved after 70 million years of fossilization," said lead author Gregory Erickson, a biology professor at Florida State University, who described hadrosaurids as "walking pulp mills." Their broad jaws bearing as many as 1,400 teeth suggest hadrosaurids evolved the most advanced grinding capacity known in vertebrate animals, the researchers said. "Their complex dentition could have played a major role in keeping them on the planet for nearly 35 million years," American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Mark Norell said.
*-- NASA celebrates first Mars rover scoop --*PASADENA, Calif. - NASA scientists say they are celebrating the Mars Curiosity rover's first collection of martian soil to be analyzed for a possible history of microbial life. The first scoop of dirt, although a simple action, is a "huge milestone" in the Curiosity mission, deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada told the Los Angeles Times Monday. "There was a lot of clapping yesterday, probably the most since landing, when we saw a nice full pile of soil in the scoop," Vasavada said. "It looks and acts a lot like baking flour. And just like any baker, we shook the scoop to make sure we had a nice level spoonful. This also mixes up the soil for us, to ensure a good analysis." The rover is at a spot in Mars' Gale Crater called Rocknest, and on Sunday work on collecting a sample was initiated from a "nice pile of soil," Vasavada, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said. "Curiosity then scuffed the soil with her wheel to confirm its depth and compactness," he said. "After some additional images and chemical data cleared the soil for scooping, the team sent up commands to scoop." Postings on the @MarsCuriosityTwitter account, which are phrased from the rover's point of view, tweeted Sunday: "So excited to dig in! One scoop of regolith ripple, coming right up!" Monday morning, there was a new tweet: "Here's the scoop: I like my regolith shaken!"
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