fossil_digger Report This Comment
Date: October 08, 2005 01:28AM

THORNY LIZARD
SPINOSAURUS AEGYPTIACUS (STROMER, 1915)
MID.CRETACEOUS (about 100 million years)
Tegana Formation
Ksar-es-Souk Region, Kem Kem basin, Moroccoan Sahara

Anonymous Report This Comment
Date: October 08, 2005 04:41AM

You are a cult of one..

fossil_digger Report This Comment
Date: October 08, 2005 05:33AM

it's too bad you can't appreciate natural history, cause nothing is more pure.

Anonymous Report This Comment
Date: October 10, 2005 08:01AM

Keep it coming - I love fossil stuff. Hey, got any thing on Haast's Eagle? Biggest eagle that ever lived that hunted Moa?

fossil_digger Report This Comment
Date: October 11, 2005 04:42AM

(A) An artist's impression of H. moorei attacking the extinct New Zealand moa. Evidence of eagle strikes are preserved on skeletons of moa weighing up to 200 kg. (Artwork: John Megahan.)
( Comparison of the huge claws of H. moorei with those of its close relative Hieraaetus morphnoides, the “little” eagle. The massive claws of H. moorei could pierce and crush bone up to 6 mm thick under 50 mm of skin and flesh.




Ancient DNA Tells Story of Giant Eagle Evolution -- For reasons not entirely clear, when animals make their way to isolated islands, they tend to evolve relatively quickly toward an outsized or pint-sized version of their mainland counterpart. One avian giant was found in New Zealand: Haast's eagle (Harpagornis moorei), with a wingspan up to 3 meters. Though Haast's Eagle could fly, its body mass (10–14 kilograms) pushed the limits for self-propelled flight. As extreme evolutionary examples, large island birds can offer insights into the forces and events shaping evolutionary change. Bunce et al. (2005) compared ancient mitochondrial DNA extracted from Haast's Eagle bones and found that the extinct raptor underwent a rapid evolutionary transformation that belies its kinship to some of the world's smallest eagle species. Their analysis places Haast's Eagle in the same evolutionary lineage as a group of small eagles in the genus Hieraaetus. Surprisingly, the genetic distance separating the giant eagle and its smaller cousins from their last common ancestor is relatively small.
Using molecular dating techniques, Bunce et al. (2005) proposed a divergence date of 0.7–1.8 million years ago. The increase in body size—by at least an order of magnitude in less than 2 million years—is remarkable, Bunce et al. (2005) argue, because it occurred in a species still capable of flight. The absence of mammalian competitors may have precipitated the rapid morphological shift. Haast's eagle, the authors wrote, “represents an extreme example of how freedom from competition on island ecosystems can rapidly influence morphological adaptation and speciation.”

fossil_digger Report This Comment
Date: October 11, 2005 05:28AM

Hamilton, ON - Gigantic eagles swooping from the skies to rescue Frodo and Sam in the Lord of the Rings may not be just the stuff of legends and fairytales, according to research published in the journal PloS Biology.

McMaster University anthropologist Michael Bunce has shed new light on the evolution of the extinct Haast’s eagle, the giant bird that once ruled the skies over New Zealand.

Weighing between 20 and 30 pounds, the enormous Haast's Eagle dominated its environment. It was 30 to 40 per cent heavier than the largest living bird of prey around today, the Harpy Eagle of Central and South America.

Working in New Zealand, Bunce extracted DNA from fossil eagle bones dating back about 2000 years.

He says, "When we began the project it was to prove the relationship of the extinct Haast's Eagle with the large Australian Wedge-tailed Eagle. But the DNA results were so radical that, at first, we questioned their authenticity."

The results showed that the New Zealand giant was in fact related to one of the world's smallest eagles – the Little Eagle from Australia and New Guinea, which typically weighs under two pounds.

"Even more striking was how closely related genetically the two species were. We estimate that their common ancestor lived less than a million years ago. It means that an eagle arrived in New Zealand and increased in weight by 10 to15 times over this period, which is very fast in evolutionary terms. Such rapid size change is unprecedented in birds and animals," adds Bunce.

Before human settlement 700 years ago, New Zealand had virtually no terrestrial mammals. Apart from bats, the only inhabitants were approximately 250 species of birds. At the top of the food chain was the Haast's Eagle, the only eagle known to have been the top predator in a major terrestrial ecosystem. The eagles hunted moa, the herbivorous, flightless birds of New Zealand, which can weigh more than 400 pounds. Scientists believe the eagle died out within two centuries of human settlement of New Zealand.

fossil_digger Report This Comment
Date: October 11, 2005 05:46AM

the spinosaurus was the sail-finned long jawed dino in jurassic park 3