Friday Headlines: 10-11-13

Friday Headlines, October 11, 2013

THE LATEST IN THE GEOSCIENCES

 

Today’s round-up:

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?

Triceratops and Torosaurus are not the same thing!

What do you get when you mix lava and water and it doesn’t explode?

Planet on the loose!

 

FYI: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Summary: The egg.

Since the amniotic egg (those enclosed within a shell and with the special layers, like the amnion, the corion, and the yolk sac) arose with the earliest reptiles, and that birds evolved from reptiles, we know the egg came first.

That is all.

 

Torosaurus Is Not Triceratops: Ontogeny in Chasmosaurine Ceratopsids as a Case Study in Dinosaur Taxonomy

OK, before your brain explodes…

Triceratops is the species of horned dinosaur that most everyone has heard of. Torosaurus is a similar dinosaur. For years, they have been considered different species.

A couple of years ago a paper was published proposing that Triceratops is nothing more than a juvenile Torosaurus. As you might guess, there has bee some fearsome debate about this.

This week, a new paper in PLOS-one (an open-access journal, which means anyone can read it) showed that Triceratops and Torosaurus are not the same thing.

Now, dinosaurs are not my specialty, but I suspect the case isn’t closed on this topic. I expect there to be lots of discussion on this when I’m at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting in a couple of weeks.

 

Water and lava, but—curiously—no explosion

At the interface between the sky and land or water, the typical result of molten rock meeting water is an explosion. The water instantly boils and also cools the rock. The rock shatters and is blasted all over the place. (Sounds fun, doesn’t it?)Basalt pillars in Iceland record the rare instance where water and lava touch and an explosion did not result. It’s likely that the lava moved slowly enough that flash boiling did not occur, thus allowing for the formation of the fascinating hollow basalt towers dotting the Skaelingar valley in Iceland.

This research was conducted by Tracy Gregg and Kenneth Christle, affiliated with the University of Buffalo.

 

Lonely planet without a star discovered wandering our galaxy

There’s this concept out there called ‘rogue planets.’ We imagine planets always orbiting some star, much like our Earth orbits the sun. But that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Wandering planets that do not orbit any star are called rogue.Astronomers have finally found one.The planet PSO J318.5-22 was recently discovered about 80 light years from Earth. Its mass is about six times that of Jupiter and it’s only about 12 million years old. That’s basically newborn, when you consider that the Universe is estimated to be about 14 billion years old, and the Earth itself is approximately 4.6 billion years old.