Small and speedy dinosaur recognised as a new species

 

Image courtesy of © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London

Joel Kontinen

Some evolutionists believe that the dinosaurs are divided into too many clans but now it seem that they have overrated it and that there are not so much different dinosaurs at all.

Enigmacursor darted around North America in the Late Jurassic 145-150 million years ago and its skeleton now be on display in London’s Natural History Museum

A newly discovered species of dinosaur is going on display in London’s Natural History Museum.

Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae was a speedy, two-legged herbivore, 64 centimetres tall and 180 cm long that lived about 145 million to 150 million years ago, during the Late Jurassic Period.

Its reconstructed skeleton will be on display in the museum’s Earth Hall from 26 June, alongside its contemporary, Sophie the Stegosaurus.

Susannah Maidment and Paul Barrett, both palaeontologists at the Natural History Museum, have analysed the Enigmacursor specimen, which was uncovered from the Morrison Formation in the western US in 2021-22.

Back then, it was thought to be a Nanosaurus – a poorly known species of small herbivorous dinosaur. The Enigmacursor fossil isn’t complete, but using the few teeth – which reveal it ate plants – and portions of the neck, backbone, tail, pelvis, limbs and feet, Maidment and Barrett have defined this fossil as a new species, placed it in an evolutionary tree and reconstructed it for display.

They have based the structure of missing elements, like the skull, on similar small dinosaurs like Yandusaurus and Hexinlusaurus. Generally, we know little about smaller dinosaurs, both because they are less likely to fossilise than bigger animals and because fossil hunters tend to seek larger, more valuable examples.

“This is a two-legged dinosaur and it’s got very small forearms that it probably would have used to grasp food to bring it to its mouth,” says Maidment. “And it’s got incredibly large feet and very long limbs. So, it was probably quite fast by dinosaur standards.”

That is where the “cursor” part of its name comes from: it means “runner”. Maidment says it was probably charging around in the shadows of behemoths like Diplodocus and Stegosaurus.

The specimen’s vertebrae weren’t fused, which implies it wasn’t fully mature when it died. “I think this animal was probably a teenager, but it may well have been sexually mature, so it might not have got that much bigger,” says Maidment.

“Enigmacursor represents one of the rarities from further down the food chain of the dinosaur era,” says David Norman at the University of Cambridge. “This newly described animal was clearly a small, wallaby-sized herbivore that scampered around the Late Jurassic countryside.”

The discovery sheds light on the early evolutionary stages of the herbivorous dinosaurs that would go on to dominate Cretaceous ecosystems in North America, says Maidment, and helps us build a more realistic ecological picture of the life and times of dinosaurs.

Source:

Chris Simms 2025 Enigmacursor mollyborthwickae: Small and speedy dinosaur recognised as a new species | New Scientist 25 June 

Stellar flares may hamper search for life in promising star system

 

Image courtesy of Mark Garlick/Alamy

Joel Kontinen

Some planets are formed that they have life. But only exoplanets tend not to have it. The latest case is the Trappist 1 saga which probably has none.

Astronomers have been trying to detect atmospheres on planets orbiting TRAPPIST-1, but bursts of radiation from the star make this challenging.

The search for atmospheres around the TRAPPIST-1 star system, one of the most promising locations for life elsewhere in the galaxy, might be even more difficult than astronomers first thought because of short-lived radiation blasts from the star.

TRAPPIST-1, first discovered in 2016, is a small red dwarf star about 40 light years from Earth with at least seven planets orbiting it. It is a prime target for astronomers hoping to detect extraterrestrial life because several of its planets appear to sit in a habitable zone where temperatures are just right for liquid water.

Source: 

Alex Wilkins 2025 Stellar flares may hamper search for life in promising star system | New Scientist 23 June

Enigmatic lizards somehow survived near Chicxulub asteroid impact

 

A yellow-spotted tropical night lizard (Lepidophyma flavimaculatum)

Image courtesy of Dante Fenolio/Science Photo Library

Joel Kontinen

Lizards are not dinosaurs. but somehow the dinosaur eating catastrophe that happened some 66 million years old did not affect these lizards. They may have been present some 66 million years ago.

The night lizards may have been the only terrestrial vertebrates that survived in the region of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs

A small, secretive group of lizards that still exists today may have been the only terrestrial vertebrates that survived in the vicinity of the Chicxulub asteroid collision, which led to the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.

It has long been known that xantusiid night lizards are an ancient lineage that have persisted for tens of millions of years. But Chase Brownstein at Yale University and his colleagues suspected that the group may have actually arisen earlier than previously thought: in the Cretaceous Period, which ended around 66 million years ago.

The end of the Cretaceous was marked by a giant asteroid strike in the vicinity of Yucatán peninsula in Mexico, which left a crater over 150 kilometres wide and caused the extinction of most of the animal and plant species across the world.

Brownstein and his team used previously published DNA sequence data for xantusiids to create an evolutionary tree for the group. They combined this with skeletal anatomy across living and fossil night lizards, allowing the team to determine how old their lineages are and estimate how many offspring the ancestral night lizards would have produced.

They found that the most recent common ancestor of living xantusiids emerged deep within the Cretaceous, over 93 million years ago, and they probably only had clutches of one or two offspring.

“I think it is very possible that these ancient populations were as close or closer to the impact site than those today,” says Brownstein. “It’s almost as if xantusiid distribution sketches a circle around the impact site.”

Based on fossil evidence, it is unlikely that the ancient night lizards simply recolonised the region later on, says Brownstein.

“We know from our reconstructions that the common ancestor of living species was almost certainly living in North America, where the fossil record of xantusiids is pretty much fairly continuous on either side of the boundary layer marking the impact,” he says.

Many night lizard species live in rock crevices and their slow metabolisms are comparable to those of other survivors of the mass extinction, such as turtles and crocodiles. “This, perhaps, would have allowed them to take shelter during the impact and its immediate aftermath,” says Brownstein.

Nathan Lo at the University of Sydney says the lizards are remarkable. “They lived in the region around the asteroid’s point of impact, [yet] they managed to survive, even though the asteroid would have wiped out organisms that were within hundreds of kilometres of the impact point.”

They managed this despite not having many of the usual traits that we would expect to see in survivors of mass extinctions. “The species that tend to survive through these extinction events are those that are small in size, reproduce quickly and that have large geographic ranges,” says Lo. “But these lizards generally reproduce slowly and seem to have quite small ranges.”

 Source: 

James Woodford 2025 Enigmatic lizards somehow survived near Chicxulub asteroid impact | New Scientist 25 June 

Sea spiders 'farm' methane-eating bacteria on their bodies

 

Image courtesy of Biance Dal Bó

Joel Kontinen

Could a sizable amount of methane be harmful for us and the world? Now it seems that a Sea-spiders species kills off methane. This was probably brought off by intelligent design that want to keep us going strong.

Spider-like creatures living near methane seeps on the seafloor appear to cultivate and consume microbial species on their bodies that feed on the energy-rich gas. This expands the set of organisms known to rely on symbiotic relationships with microbes to live in these otherworldly environments.

Shana Goffredi at Occidental College in California and her colleagues collected sea spiders – marine arthropods named for their resemblance to arachnids – living near three different methane seeps in the Pacific Ocean. They found three previously unknown species from the sea spider genus Sericosura that appear to be abundant only near these gas seeps.

Other types of sea spiders that don’t live near seeps largely eat other invertebrates. But the researchers found the new sea spiders appear to get most of their nutrition by eating a distinctive set of bacterial species that live on their bodies. These bacteria harvest energy by metabolising methane and methanol coming from the seeps, energy that would otherwise be inaccessible to the sea spiders.

The researchers found the bacteria were confined to the spiders’ exoskeletons like a “microbial fur coat”, growing in what Goffredi describes as “volcano-like” clusters. The layers of bacterial growth also had markings like lawnmower tracks where the spiders may have munched on them using their hard “lips” and three tiny teeth.

To confirm the sea spiders really were eating the bacteria, the researchers also used a radioactive labelling technique to track how the carbon in methane was consumed by the sea spiders in the lab. “We watched that methane go into the microbes that are on the surface of the spiders, and then we watched that carbon molecule move into the tissues of the spider,” says Goffredi.

Source:

James Dinneen 2025 Sea spiders 'farm' methane-eating bacteria on their bodies | New Scientist 20 June

Can space rock around Venus collide with Earth?

 

Image courtesy of ESA

Joel Kontinen

An 'invisible threat': Swarm of hidden 'city killer' asteroids around Venus could one day collide with Earth, simulations show

Could a killer asteroid one day collide with Earth? According to a new study, it could. This bring to mind the killer asteroids mentioned in the book of Revelation: “The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.” Rev. 8:10-11.

Researchers think there are more hidden space rocks lurking around Venus. All but one of the planet's known co-orbitals have eccentricities greater than 0.38, meaning they have very elongated trajectories around the planet. This suggests there is an observational bias, likely because objects with lower eccentricities are probably being obscured by the sun's glare.

Co-orbitals can also move around relative to Venus, which can change their chances of colliding with Earth in the future. Previous research has shown that this likely happens to the space rocks once roughly every 12,000 years — known as a co-orbital cycle.

We know that Earth is not 12,000 years old so there is a problem which this.  

Source:

Harry Baker 2025 An 'invisible threat': Swarm of hidden 'city killer' asteroids around Venus could one day collide with Earth, simulations show | Live Science June 4

 

 

Australian moths use the stars as a compass on 1000-km migrations

 

Image courtesy of Dr. Ajay Narendra/Macquarie University, Australia

Joel Kontinen

Bogong moths are the first invertebrates known to navigate using the night sky during annual migrations to highland caves

Can the Australian moth use the stars to reach a destination that is a thousand kilometres away?

The answer seems to be Yes, they can. This is according to the latest research.   

An Australian moth that migrates over 1000 kilometres to seek respite from summer heat is the first known invertebrate to use the stars as a compass on long journeys.

Every spring, billions of bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) travel from various parts of southern Australia to cool caves in the Australian Alps after spending the winter as caterpillars feeding on vegetation. Once in the caves, they have a long period of inactivity, called aestivation, before returning to their breeding grounds.

It has long been a mystery exactly how these moths, whose numbers have been collapsing in recent years, navigate so far to these high country caves, says Andrea Adden at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

Previous studies have shown that they are able to use Earth’s electromagnetic field, but only in combination with landmarks they can see. Adden and her colleagues wanted to find out what other cues the moths may be using to navigate.

“If you go to the Australian bush, where these moths live, and look around at night, one of the most striking visual landmarks is the Milky Way,” she says. “We know that daytime migratory insects use the sun, so testing the starry sky seemed an obvious thing to try.”

To do so, the team caught moths during their migration using light traps and took them to a lab. There, the insects were placed in a Perspex arena and an image of the night sky was projected onto a screen above them. The moths were tethered inside the arena but could pick a flight direction based on the sky image. The researchers used a device called a Helmholtz coil to essentially cancel out Earth’s magnetic field.

The tests showed that the moths use a stellar compass, says team member Eric Warrant at Lund University, Sweden. “When tethered moths were placed under highly realistic local starry night skies, they flew in their inherited migratory direction,” he says. “They did this solely with the help of these stars – all other visual cues, as well as the Earth’s magnetic field, were absent.”

When the team turned the starry sky by 180 degrees, moths flew in the opposite direction, and when they randomly redistributed the natural stars across the image they were completely disoriented.

In a second experiment, the moths were fixed in place with a very thin electrode inserted in their brains. This revealed changes in the moths’ neural activity when the projected sky image was rotated.

Although dung beetles use the Milky Way to stay on the same bearing over short distances, no insect was known to use celestial navigation for migration until now.

“The bogong moth is the first invertebrate we know of that is able to use the stars as a compass for long-distance navigation to a distant destination that it has never previously been to,” says Warrant. “Only humans and some species of night migratory birds are known to have this ability.”

Another insect famous for long-distance migrations, the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus), uses the sun to navigate, factoring in the time of day.

It may be that intelligent design has given these moths the way to use the start and the worlds electromagnetic field to do this.

Source:

 James Woodford 2025 Australian moths use the stars as a compass on 1000-km migrations | New Scientist 18 June 

Aussie living fossil conundrum

Joel Kontinen

Living creatures often look much the same as their fossil counterparts supposedly living millions of years ago, earning the label ‘living fossils’.

Some evolutionists say the environment (and thus selection pressures) musts have stayed the same for all that time. But the ‘environment’ also includes the predators and prey supposedly evolving all around it.

Others conveniently claim that if only we had the fossil’s DNA, we would realize it only looks the same despite having evolved greatly.

A recent article listing an array of Australian living fossils said, ‘Australia’s isolation has allowed many such species to flourish, shielded from external pressures that influenced global evolution. “I.e., they were spared many environmental changes.

Except that, one sentence before, it has living fossils in general “often surviving environmental changes that drove others to extinction.” So, on the one hand, their geography shielded them from environmental change, On the other, they survived huge environmental change. Evolution is clearly very flexible, capable of explaining many an outcome. Only it helps not to have two contradictory explanations in the one paragraph.

The biblical creation/Flood/dispersion explanation is much more straightforward.

Source:

Weber,C., The living fossils of Australia: these ancient creatures defy evolution, msn.com, 8 Mar 2025

 

Israel strikes Iran

 

 Image courtesy of IsraeliPM

WWII Bomber Plane P-38 Found 300 Feet Below the Ice in Greenland

 

Glazier Girl. Image courtesy of Sgt. Ben Bloker, public domain.

Joel Kontinen


A World War II airplane that was lost in Greenland has been spotted by an aerial drone.

On July 4, 2018 California businessman Jim Salazar told the wrecked P-38 was beneath “more than 300 feet (91 meters) of ice using a ground-penetrating radar antenna fitted to a heavy-lift aerial drone.”

“This latest find echoes the 1992 recovery of another P-38 fighter from the same ‘Lost Squadron’ of U.S. warplanes in Greenland. That fighter was eventually restored to flying condition under the name ‘Glacier Girl’.

Both aircraft were part of a group of two B-17 bombers and six P-38 fighters flying from the U.S. to Britain in July 1942. They were traveling through a chain of secret airbases in Newfoundland, Greenland and Iceland known as the Snowball Route.

Hundreds of U.S. aircraft flew this route during World War II as part of Operation Bolero, which delivered warplanes, pilots, equipment and supplies for the planned Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe.”

This brings to nought the geological sediments, which are thought to be millions of years old.

Source:

Metcalfe, Tom, 2018. 'Lost Squadron' WWII Warplane Discovered Deep Beneath a Greenland Glacier. Live Science (August 25).