T=Rex stars in Minions

Minions\

The Tyrannosaurus Rex is a character seen at the beginning of the film Minions, it was the first master of the Minions after the tribe's landing. 

The story goes that after the Minions left the sea, a T. Rex rushed an Amphibian creature at the beach, the last master of Minions in the ocean, so the Minions regarded T. Rex at their new master. Soon, many Minions climbed on the T. Rex's body and remaining Minions followed it, which made it pleased about these new creatures it found.

Two Minions found a banana tree under a large rock and one of them picked a banana, which triggered the rock rolling down from the hill and brought the T. Rex to the edge of a lava pit. At last, thanks to one of the falling Minions bumped into the rock, it fell into the lava so the Minions left for new master.

In the post-credit, its appearance scares away all characters from the stage, except young Gru. The dinosaur roars and Gru finally notices it, and he tries to shoot it by the Freeze Ray but the weapon jams.

Trivia

The dinosaur can be seen again in a commercial video for GoPro based of the The Secret Life of Pets; in the video, Sweetpea flies in front of the television which is playing a scene with an alley full of hung clothes, and he hides himself into his cage when he sees the T-Rex dinosaur.

Manny

 

New Dinosaur from Uzbekistan timurlengia euotica.

A new species of tyrannosaur has been discovered in the Kyzyl Kum desert of Uzbekistan.  The fossils found are believed to be dated to 90 to 92 million years old, in the Cretaceous period. This early tyrannosaur, which has been named Timurlengia euotica was a close cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex and its discovery may hold the key to explaining how its infamous big cousin went on to become such fearsome predators and reach such massive sizes (12 metres in length and weighing a colossal 6.8 tonnes). It would have weighed between 170 to 270 kilograms, would have been about the size of a horse, but covered in a mixture of skin and feathers.

It was a nimble pursuit hunter and would have chased down its prey before making short work of them with its slender razor sharp teeth, highly suitable for slicing through meat. It probably preyed on the various large plant-eaters, especially early duck-billed dinosaurs, which shared its world.

From just a handful of fossilised bones and a well preserved brain case, palaeontologist’s have been able to build a picture of the Timurlengia  euotica.

 Researchers believe that the animal marks an evolutionary turning point for the tyrannosaurs, where the keen senses and brainpower of the top hunters were developed and refined.  Analysis of its brain casing showed it had already developed inner ear structures which would have enabled it to hear lower frequencies, an advantage for top predators when it came to hearing prey and rivals.  It shows that the advanced brain and senses of the colossal later Cretaceous apex predator T. rex were were already present in the Late Jurassic, more than 90 million years ago. 

However, the sinuses of Timurlengia were seen to be much simpler than their later cousin - whose heightened sense of smell would have helped it to find prey - hinting that the tyrannosaurs had not yet finished evolving all of the master hunter's attributes. As the animals are on a separate branch of the tyrannosaur family tree, it would also indicate that the these attributes developed in a common ancestor even further back, before splitting off.

Some interesting facts about the Parasaurolophus

 

Scientific name: Parasaurolophus

Higher classification: Parasaurolophini

Phylum: Chordata

Order: Ornithischia

Rank: Genus

 

Source: Wikipedia 

Some interesting facts about the Parasaurolophus

Parasaurolophus is a genus of ornithopod dinosaur that lived in what is now North America during the Late Cretaceous Period, about 76.5–74.5 million years ago. Fossils have been found in Alberta, Canada as well as Utah and New Mexico, USA.

Parasaurolophus were herbivores (plant eaters).

It could walk on either two legs (biped) or all four (quadruped) and was around 9.5 metres in length and weighed around 2.7 tonnes.

It  comes from a family of dinosaurs known as Hadrosauridae that were known for having strangely shaped skulls. Parasaurolophus featured a crest on its head that formed a long, curved pipe pointing backwards from the skull.  There is much debate about the functions of the crest, scientists say that it helped the male and females identify each other. Further that increased their hearing ability (acoustic resonance) and allowed them to regulate their body temperature (thermoregulation).

Source:  http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/sciencefacts/dinosaurs/parasaurolophus.html

The woolly mammoth reborn?

The woolly mammoth one of the closest ancestor of todays elephants.

 

Woolly mammoths, which had significant populations in the northern hemisphere during the pre-glacial period, went extinct due to hunting and the climate change.  According to experts, warmer atmosphere due to the end of the ice age shrank the habitat of these giants. And although the creature went extinct thousands of years ago, scientists are now trying to artificially create this elephant-like mammal through cloning. A team of researchers at Harvard University believe they could bring back the woolly mammoth from extinction within the next two years. 

 

They believe that advances in gene cloning science will allow them to make what just a few years ago would have been considered an impossibility that is to bring a species back from extinction. They have been studying the DNA from frozen mammoths found preserved in the Arctic. Specifically, they’ve been looking for genes that separated them from elephants.

 

Mammoth DNA was obtained from Siberian permafrost specimens. The DNA helped them to recreate 14 genes of the mammoth after rigorous analysis. Sophisticated technique of ‘clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat ‘allowed them to edit DNA in such a way that modern DNA was manipulated to replace prehistoric genes.  The Asian elephant, closest living species to mammoth as per the gene map was chosen for the experiment.

 

Elephant cells are fully functioning now with mammoth DNA. Scientists by splicing mammoth DNA into the genome of an elephant embryo believe they can create a mammoth-elephant hybrid. Then grow it  within an artificial womb.The resultant creature would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits than a mammoth. As awesome as playing Ice Age Jurassic Park sounds, there are also other preventative applications for this technology for engineering the DNA of rapidly declining species or those that are becoming too inbred to increase their chance of survival.

 

Many scientific commentators have termed this process as a part of ‘De-Extinction’.  The scientists at Harvard also believe that the 'new' woolly mammoth can help for the betterment of ecology in Siberia.

 

 

Sabre-toothed Tiger

The saber toothed tiger also known as a smilodon any of the extinct catlike carnivores belonging to either the extinct family Nimravidae or the subfamily Machairodontinae of the cat family (Felidae). Named for the pair of elongated bladelike canine teeth in their upper jaw, they are often called sabre-toothed tigers or sabre-toothed lions, although the modern lion and tiger are true cats of the subfamily Felinae.

Smilodon is perhaps one of the most famous prehistoric mammals. Although commonly known as the saber-toothed tiger, it was not closely related to the tiger or other modern cats. Smilodon lived in the Americas during the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 mya–10,000 years ago). Overall, Smilodon was more robustly built than any extant cat, with particularly well-developed forelimbs and exceptionally long upper canine teeth. Its jaw had a bigger gape than that of modern cats, and its upper canines were slender and fragile, being adapted for precision killing. S. gracilis was the smallest species at 55 to 100 kg in weight. S. fatalis had a weight of 160 to 280 kg and height of 100 cm. Both of these species are mainly known from North America, but remains from South America have also been attributed to them. S. populator from South America is perhaps the largest known felid at 220 to 400 kg in weight and 120 cm in height. The coat pattern of Smilodon is unknown, but it has been artistically restored with plain or spotted patterns.

The Smilodon hunted large herbivores such as bison and camels, and is thought to have killed its prey by holding it still with its forelimbs and biting it in the neck. Scientists debate whether Smilodon had a social or a solitary lifestyle; analysis of modern predator behaviour as well as of Smilodon's fossil remains lends support to either view. The Smilodon probably lived in closed habitats such as forests and bush, which would have provided cover for ambushing prey. The Smilodon died out at the same time that most North and South American megafauna disappeared, about 10,000 years ago. Its reliance on large animals has been proposed as the cause of its extinction, along with climate change and competition with other species, but the exact cause is unknown.

Tashkent Zoo