SCIENTISTS HAVE DISCOVERED a species of snake unlike any seen before, but this special serpent wasn't found sliding through its forested habitat in tropical Mexico. The newfound animal made its scientific debut in a more unconventional place: inside another snake’s belly.
Newly-described in a recent paper in the Journal of Herpetology, the creature has been appropriately dubbed Cenaspis aenigma, which translates to “mysterious dinner snake.” The name derives from the Latin cena (dinner), aspis (a snake variety), and enigma.
This species has unique features that separate it from its relatives, including the shape of the its skull, the covering of its hemipenis—its reproductive structure—and the scales under its tail.
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Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Wed Dec 19, 2018 5:28 pm
by ousdahl
hemipenis?
More like, Shirley’s law.
Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2018 10:09 am
by Deleted User 89
sorry, didn’t want to contribute to all the non-basketball talk
Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2018 7:06 am
by Shirley
TraditionKU wrote: ↑Fri Dec 21, 2018 10:09 am
sorry, didn’t want to contribute to all the non-basketball talk
The beginning of the end started with violent shaking that raised giant waves in the waters of an inland sea in what is now North Dakota.
Then, tiny glass beads began to fall like birdshot from the heavens. The rain of glass was so heavy it may have set fire to much of the vegetation on land. In the water, fish struggled to breathe as the beads clogged their gills.
The heaving sea turned into a 30-foot wall of water when it reached the mouth of a river, tossing hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh-water fish — sturgeon and paddlefish — onto a sand bar and temporarily reversing the flow of the river. Stranded by the receding water, the fish were pelted by glass beads up to 5 millimeters in diameter, some burying themselves inches deep in the mud. The torrent of rocks, like fine sand, and small glass beads continued for another 10 to 20 minutes before a second large wave inundated the shore and covered the fish with gravel, sand and fine sediment, sealing them from the world for 66 million years.
This unique, fossilized graveyard — fish stacked one atop another and mixed in with burned tree trunks, conifer branches, dead mammals, mosasaur bones, insects, the partial carcass of a Triceratops, marine microorganisms called dinoflagellates and snail-like marine cephalopods called ammonites — was unearthed by paleontologist Robert DePalma over the past six years in the Hell Creek Formation, not far from Bowman, North Dakota. The evidence confirms a suspicion that nagged at DePalma in his first digging season during the summer of 2013 — that this was a killing field laid down soon after the asteroid impact that eventually led to the extinction of all ground-dwelling dinosaurs. The impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period, the so-called K-T boundary, exterminated 75 percent of life on Earth.
“This is the first mass death assemblage of large organisms anyone has found associated with the K-T boundary,” said DePalma, curator of paleontology at the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History in Florida and a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. “At no other K-T boundary section on Earth can you find such a collection consisting of a large number of species representing different ages of organisms and different stages of life, all of which died at the same time, on the same day.”
Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 7:18 am
by Deleted User 89
colleagues/friends are working at the hell creek site
it’s pretty amazing what they’re finding
i think they’ve got a paper coming out in PNAS in the coming weeks
Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 7:35 am
by Shirley
TraditionKU wrote: ↑Sat Mar 30, 2019 7:18 am
colleagues/friends are working at the hell creek site
it’s pretty amazing what they’re finding
i think they’ve got a paper coming out in PNAS in the coming weeks
^^^
The next paragraph after I stopped copying:
In a paper to be published next week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and his American and European colleagues, including two University of California, Berkeley, geologists, describe the site, dubbed Tanis, and the evidence connecting it with the asteroid or comet strike off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago. That impact created a huge crater, called Chicxulub, in the ocean floor and sent vaporized rock and cubic miles of asteroid dust into the atmosphere. The cloud eventually enveloped Earth, setting the stage for Earth’s last mass extinction.
...Co-authors with DePalma, Smit, Richards and Alvarez are David Burnham of the University of Kansas, Klaudia Kuiper of Vrije Universiteit, Phillip Manning of Manchester University in the United Kingdom, Anton Oleinik of Florida Atlantic University, Peter Larson of the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in South Dakota, Florentin Maurrasse of Florida International University, Johan Vellekoop of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and Loren Gurche of the Palm Beach Museum of Natural History.
Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 7:47 am
by Deleted User 89
lol
Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 7:55 am
by Shirley
But apparently, there's some Drama!!!
Re: Things Trad Doesn't Tell Us
Posted: Sat Mar 30, 2019 9:17 am
by Deleted User 62
My Mexico beach house was just a few miles from Chicxulub.
The impact created the "ring of cenotes", over 2,000 freshwater cenotes on Yucatan state.
