The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Weird ‘chicken from hell’ dinosaur lived alongside T. Rex Posted: 19 Mar 2014 08:58 PM PDT A dinosaur called Anzu wyliei that scientists identified yesterday from fossils found in North Dakota and South Dakota does just that. It had a head shaped like a bird's, a toothless beak, an odd crest on its cranium, hands with big sharp claws, long legs for fast running and was probably covered in feathers. It is the largest North American example of a type of bird-like dinosaur well known from Asia. Its extensive remains offer a detailed picture of the North American branch of these dinosaurs that had remained mysterious since their first bones were found about a century ago, the scientists said. What would someone think if they encountered this creature that lived 66 million years ago? "I don't know whether they would scream and run away, or laugh, because it is just an absurd-looking monster chicken," said University of Utah palaeontologist Emma Schachner, one of the researchers. Anzu wyliei measured about 3.5m long, 1.5 m tall at the hip and weighed about 200 to 300 kg, the researchers said. "It has the nickname 'the chicken from hell.' And that's a pretty good description," said palaeontologist Matt Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who led the research published in the journal Plos One. "If you could get in a time machine and go back to Western North America at the end of the age of dinosaurs and see this thing, I would say your first reaction might be, 'What a weird looking bird,'" Lamanna added. "It would not look like most people's conception of a dinosaur." Scientists think birds arose much earlier from small feathered dinosaurs. The earliest known bird is 150 million years old. This dinosaur's bird-like traits included a beak, hollow leg bones and air spaces in its backbone, said palaeontologist Hans-Dieter Sues of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. Its bizarre head crest resembled that of the cassowary, a flightless bird native to Australia and New Guinea. Fossils of feathers are extremely rare and they were not found with any of the three partial skeletons of Anzu wyliei. But the researchers believe it had feathers based on fossils of close relatives from China that have clear evidence of them. Asian cousins It closely resembles its Asian cousins like Oviraptor, whose fossils have been found brooding over a clutch of its eggs in a bird-like manner. The Asian part of the family includes many well-preserved examples, from ones as small as a turkey to one even bigger than Anzu wyliei. The North American branch until now had been represented by largely fragmentary remains. Anzu wyliei lived at the sunset of the age of dinosaurs, not long before an enormous meteorite is thought to have struck Earth about 65.5 million years ago and wiped them out along with hordes of other creatures, while sparing many birds. It lived in a humid, warm, low-lying environment dotted with rivers and swamps that may have looked like the Louisiana bayou. It was lush with vegetation and plant-eating dinosaurs like the horned Triceratops, armored Ankylosaurus, dome-headed Pachycephalosaurus and duck-billed Edmontosaurus. But also hanging around the neighbourhood was one of the fiercest predators in Earth's history, Tyrannosaurus rex. Anzu wyliei may have been an omnivore, munching on leaves, fruits or flowers while also swallowing the occasional mammal foolish enough to cross its path, the researchers said. It probably needed to be careful not to end up on someone else's menu. "To a T. rex, this thing would not look like a 'chicken from hell.' It would look like lunch," Lamanna said. Its genus name, Anzu, is named after a feathered demon in Sumerian mythology. Its species name, wyliei, honours the grandson of a trustee of the Carnegie museum in Pittsburgh where the lead researcher works. The three sets of bones – which together included almost all parts of the skeleton – come from a region famed for dinosaur remains known as the Hell Creek Formation of the Dakotas and Montana. Two of the three sets of remains had partially healed injuries, perhaps the remnants of a couple of dinosaur tussles. – Reuters, March 20, 2014. |
| Ukraine’s citizen army at forefront of media war Posted: 19 Mar 2014 05:52 PM PDT Journalists, advertising executives and students have signed up as volunteers to join a propaganda war against Russia, which they accuse of deliberately misleading the public using wide-reaching state-controlled news agencies, television channels and newspapers. "Ukraine has been losing the war that's being waged in the media. Russians have been very consciously, deliberately pursuing the strategy of misinforming the worldwide community," Yaryna Klyuchkovska, one of the coordinators of the recently established Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, told AFP. "Our weapon is information... We need to mobilise to provide a counterweight," added her colleague Oxana Melnychuk. The centre set up by PR and advertising executives holds daily news conferences with ministers and activists, and publishes analyses that counter the Russian point of view. Another group of mostly journalists and students have meanwhile created a fact-checking website called StopFake.org that examines official statements and news reports, and if necessary, sets the record straight. Both information resources quickly gained a wide following in the social media sphere, acquiring a reputation like that of EuromaidanPR - the official voice of the protests that broke out in Kiev in November and led to the ouster of pro-Kremlin president Viktor Yanukovych. Russian troops subseqently took control of Crimea, and on Tuesday Putin signed a treaty absorbing the flashpoint peninsula, while Ukraine's Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk warned that "the conflict is shifting from a political to a military stage". Yevhen Fedchenko, who is director of Kiev's Mohyla School of Journalism and one of the coordinators of StopFake.org, said the aim of the website is to fill the "total vacuum of information" from the new Ukrainian authorities. Hundreds of volunteers now monitor, verify and translate official statements and media reports, filling in for a government still finding its way after just four weeks on the job. Among Moscow's "propaganda" claims the Ukrainian volunteers are attempting to clarify are charges that extremists and "Nazis" are running amok in Ukraine. Russian media also regularly misuse pictures and video footage to depict tensions where none exist, they said. "It's just a drop in the ocean... (but) it's important that people in Ukraine and Russia and in the West get these messages straight," Fedchenko said. Though there is no official funding, companies and individuals are keeping the effort alive by contributing computers, televisions or simply coffee to keep volunteers going. "We're not paid a single penny, but we're all patriots, we do understand the responsibility of the moment," said Sergiy Malyarchuk, who coordinates the Crisis Media Centre's interpreters. "War is war. You don't ask questions, you just see a need and you step in," said freelance PR consultant Klyuchkovska. Some have taken time off from work to volunteer, while others were idling anyway because of the unrest in Ukraine, like Malyarchuk, whose plastic recycling business "stopped for a while". "There's no sense going to work and doing nothing. I can contribute much more down here," he said. Support comes from around the world. StopFake.org receives 100 alerts a day from Internet users flagging up reports that need to be corrected, while some of EuromaidanPR's 200 contributors are based abroad. Rather curiously, they have found a following among Russians and Russian-speakers in Ukraine – most influenced by Kremlin-loyal media. StopFake.org has received one million clicks in just a few weeks and has nearly 7,800 followers on Russia's biggest social network website VKontakte - 10 times as many as on Facebook. "The bulk of our audience is now coming from Russia," said Fedchenko, convinced that the initiatives were making people more aware of media manipulation. The "volunteer army" has also pledged to remain in the trenches for a while. "It did not start with Crimea and it will not stop with Crimea," said Fedchenko. "The necessity of doing this ... will be around for many years." – AFP, March 20, 2014. |
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