Palaeontology. The beaks of ostrich dinosaurs

Primitive ornithomimids, a ubiquitous group of specialized Cretaceous dinosaurs nested within a clade of predominantly carnivorous theropods, are known to have had teeth, whereas derived ornithomimids had an edentulous beak, which has prompted speculation about their dietary habits. Here we describe two new ornithomimid specimens in which soft-tissue structures of the beak have been preserved. These creatures probably used their beaks to strain food sediment in an aqueous environment, rather than for predation on large animals.     

Tail-assisted pitch control in lizards, robots and dinosaurs

In 1969, a palaeontologist proposed that theropod dinosaurs used their tails as dynamic stabilizers during rapid or irregular movements, contributing to their depiction as active and agile predators. Since then the inertia of swinging appendages has been implicated in stabilizing human walking, aiding acrobatic manoeuvres by primates and rodents, and enabling cats to balance on branches. Recent studies on geckos suggest that active tail stabilization occurs during climbing, righting and gliding. By contrast, studies on the effect of lizard tail loss show evidence of a decrease, an increase or no change in performance. Application of a control-theoretic framework could advance our general understanding of inertial appendage use in locomotion. Here we report that lizards control the swing of their tails in a measured manner to redirect angular momentum from their bodies to their tails, stabilizing body attitude in the sagittal plane. We video-recorded Red-Headed Agama lizards (Agama agama) leaping towards a vertical surface by first vaulting onto an obstacle with variable traction to induce a range of perturbations in body angular momentum. To examine a known controlled tail response, we built a lizard-sized robot with an active tail that used sensory feedback to stabilize pitch as it drove off a ramp. Our dynamics model revealed that a body swinging its tail experienced less rotation than a body with a rigid tail, a passively compliant tail or no tail. To compare a range of tails, we calculated tail effectiveness as the amount of tailless body rotation a tail could stabilize. A model Velociraptor mongoliensis supported the initial tail stabilization hypothesis, showing as it did a greater tail effectiveness than the Agama lizards. Leaping lizards show that inertial control of body attitude can advance our understanding of appendage evolution and provide biological inspiration for the next generation of manoeuvrable search-and-rescue robots.     

Fine structure of bone in dinosaurs, birds and mammals

After observation of detailed structural evidence for the origin of birds from dinosaurs, and in light of evidence that dinosaur bone tissue resembles the histology in mammals, the histology of bone has become one of the focal points in discussions of the physiology of dinosaurs and Mesozoic birds. Most of this microstructural information has focused on features related to the vascular organization and the amount of remodelled bone around vascular canals. However, the finer structures have received less attention, although differences in such structures have been observed among modern vertebrates. Here we present evidence that canaliculi--the submicrometre-sized channels that interconnect bone cells and vascular canals--and the collagen fibre bundles in bone are differently organized among certain dinosaur lineages. Ornithomimid dinosaurs are more like birds than mammals in these features. In canalicular structure, and to some extent in fibre bundle arrangement, ornithischian dinosaurs are more like mammals. These differences in both canalicular and lamellar structure are probably linked to differences in the process and rate of bone formation.     

Origin of avian genome size and structure in non-avian dinosaurs

Avian genomes are small and streamlined compared with those of other amniotes by virtue of having fewer repetitive elements and less non-coding DNA. This condition has been suggested to represent a key adaptation for flight in birds, by reducing the metabolic costs associated with having large genome and cell sizes. However, the evolution of genome architecture in birds, or any other lineage, is difficult to study because genomic information is often absent for long-extinct relatives. Here we use a novel bayesian comparative method to show that bone-cell size correlates well with genome size in extant vertebrates, and hence use this relationship to estimate the genome sizes of 31 species of extinct dinosaur, including several species of extinct birds. Our results indicate that the small genomes typically associated with avian flight evolved in the saurischian dinosaur lineage between 230 and 250 million years ago, long before this lineage gave rise to the first birds. By comparison, ornithischian dinosaurs are inferred to have had much larger genomes, which were probably typical for ancestral Dinosauria. Using comparative genomic data, we estimate that genome-wide interspersed mobile elements, a class of repetitive DNA, comprised 5-12% of the total genome size in the saurischian dinosaur lineage, but was 7-19% of total genome size in ornithischian dinosaurs, suggesting that repetitive elements became less active in the saurischian lineage. These genomic characteristics should be added to the list of attributes previously considered avian but now thought to have arisen in non-avian dinosaurs, such as feathers, pulmonary innovations, and parental care and nesting.     

Adaptive radiation of multituberculate mammals before the extinction of dinosaurs

The Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction approximately 66 million years ago is conventionally thought to have been a turning point in mammalian evolution. Prior to that event and for the first two-thirds of their evolutionary history, mammals were mostly confined to roles as generalized, small-bodied, nocturnal insectivores, presumably under selection pressures from dinosaurs. Release from these pressures, by extinction of non-avian dinosaurs at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, triggered ecological diversification of mammals. Although recent individual fossil discoveries have shown that some mammalian lineages diversified ecologically during the Mesozoic era, comprehensive ecological analyses of mammalian groups crossing the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary are lacking. Such analyses are needed because diversification analyses of living taxa allow only indirect inferences of past ecosystems. Here we show that in arguably the most evolutionarily successful clade of Mesozoic mammals, the Multituberculata, an adaptive radiation began at least 20 million years before the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and continued across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Disparity in dental complexity, which relates to the range of diets, rose sharply in step with generic richness and disparity in body size. Moreover, maximum dental complexity and body size demonstrate an adaptive shift towards increased herbivory. This dietary expansion tracked the ecological rise of angiosperms and suggests that the resources that were available to multituberculates were relatively unaffected by the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction. Taken together, our results indicate that mammals were able to take advantage of new ecological opportunities in the Mesozoic and that at least some of these opportunities persisted through the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction. Similar broad-scale ecomorphological inventories of other radiations may help to constrain the possible causes of mass extinctions.     

Basic avian pulmonary design and flow-through ventilation in non-avian theropod dinosaurs

Birds are unique among living vertebrates in possessing pneumaticity of the postcranial skeleton, with invasion of bone by the pulmonary air-sac system. The avian respiratory system includes high-compliance air sacs that ventilate a dorsally fixed, non-expanding parabronchial lung. Caudally positioned abdominal and thoracic air sacs are critical components of the avian aspiration pump, facilitating flow-through ventilation of the lung and near-constant airflow during both inspiration and expiration, highlighting a design optimized for efficient gas exchange. Postcranial skeletal pneumaticity has also been reported in numerous extinct archosaurs including non-avian theropod dinosaurs and Archaeopteryx. However, the relationship between osseous pneumaticity and the evolution of the avian respiratory apparatus has long remained ambiguous. Here we report, on the basis of a comparative analysis of region-specific pneumaticity with extant birds, evidence for cervical and abdominal air-sac systems in non-avian theropods, along with thoracic skeletal prerequisites of an avian-style aspiration pump. The early acquisition of this system among theropods is demonstrated by examination of an exceptional new specimen of Majungatholus atopus, documenting these features in a taxon only distantly related to birds. Taken together, these specializations imply the existence of the basic avian pulmonary Bauplan in basal neotheropods, indicating that flow-through ventilation of the lung is not restricted to birds but is probably a general theropod characteristic.     

离散度与其它参数在连通性方面的比较

研究了离散度与其它参数的关系。利用各个参数的定义及一些例子,对离散度与其它参数进行了比较,得出了离散度是一个能衡量图连通性的较好参数的结论,为用离散度研究图连通性问题奠定了基础。     

Lowland-upland migration of sauropod dinosaurs during the Late Jurassic epoch

Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest vertebrates ever to walk the Earth, and as mega-herbivores they were important parts of terrestrial ecosystems. In the Late Jurassic-aged Morrison depositional basin of western North America, these animals occupied lowland river-floodplain settings characterized by a seasonally dry climate. Massive herbivores with high nutritional and water needs could periodically experience nutritional and water stress under these conditions, and thus the common occurrence of sauropods in this basin has remained a paradox. Energetic arguments and mammalian analogues have been used to suggest that migration allowed sauropods access to food and water resources over a wide region or during times of drought or both, but there has been no direct support for these hypotheses. Here we compare oxygen isotope ratios (δ(18)O) of tooth-enamel carbonate from the sauropod Camarasaurus with those of ancient soil, lake and wetland (that is, 'authigenic') carbonates that formed in lowland settings. We demonstrate that certain populations of these animals did in fact undertake seasonal migrations of several hundred kilometres from lowland to upland environments. This ability to describe patterns of sauropod movement will help to elucidate the role that migration played in the ecology and evolution of gigantism of these and associated dinosaurs.     

New evidence on deinonychosaurian dinosaurs from the Late Cretaceous of Patagonia

Most of what is known about the evolution of deinonychosaurs (that is, the group of theropods most closely related to birds) is based on discoveries from North America and Asia. Except for Unenlagia comahuensis and some fragmentary remains from northern Africa, no other evidence was available on deinonychosaurian diversity in Gondwana. Here we report a new, Late Cretaceous member of the clade, Neuquenraptor argentinus gen. et sp. nov., representing uncontroversial evidence of a deinonychosaurian theropod in the Southern Hemisphere. The new discovery demonstrates that Cretaceous theropod faunas from the southern continents shared greater similarity with those of the northern landmasses than previously thought. Available evidence suggests that deinonychosaurians were probably distributed worldwide at least by the beginning of the Cretaceous period. The phylogenetic position of the new deinonychosaur, as well as other Patagonian coelurosaurian theropods, is compatible with a vicariance model of diversification for some groups of Gondwanan and Laurasian dinosaurs.     

Pattern of covariation between life-history traits of European birds

A large amount of variation is found in most reproductive traits of birds. Clutch size for instance, can vary from 1 to 15 between species of similar body weight. The adaptive significance of this variation is only poorly understood. According to life-history theory, large clutch size and early onset of reproduction are expected when the chances of survival are low. There is some support for the existence of such a relationship from studies of single species. Here I present evidence that, in European birds, clutch size is increased, and onset of reproduction occurs earlier in life, when the probability of survival is low.     

An oviraptorid preserved atop an embryo-bearing egg clutch sheds light on the reproductive biology of non-avialan theropod dinosaurs

Recent studies demonstrate that many avialan features evolved incrementally prior to the origin of the group,but the presence of some of these features,such as ...     

几何参数和强度参数对边坡三维稳定性的影响

利用FLAC3D软件建立边坡的三维数值模型,分别改变边坡宽高比、边坡角、岩土体内摩擦角和黏结力,采用强度折减法计算边坡安全系数.研究结果表明:随着宽高比W/H的增大,边坡安全系数明显减小,并趋于一定值;当W/H＞6,边坡问题可简化为平面应变问题;宽高比越小,边坡的三维效应越突出;当W/H＜3时,边坡三维的效应不能忽视;当坡角越小时,在相同宽高比下,稳定系数偏差越大,即边坡的三维效应越明显;随着内摩擦角的增大,边坡的三维效应逐渐减弱,且边坡滑动由深层滑动转变为浅层滑动;边坡三维效应随着黏结力的增大而增大,边坡滑动由浅层滑动转变为深层滑动,滑动面越来越缓.     

双曲面麻花钻几何参数与刃磨参数关系探讨

探讨了目前还没有引起研究人员广泛关注的双曲面麻花钻的几何参数和磨削成型这种钻型所必须的一组刃磨参数。由于该钻型的主刃是双曲面上的曲线，主刃上任一点的锋角都不同，无法代表整个主刃的结构特点。因此用主刃的外缘和横刃转点的锋角作为其设计几何参数值，并以尾隙角为补充参数，建立确定双曲面刃磨参数的一组方程。     

四维基团溶解度参数及其与分子溶解度参数的关联

为了描述基团间的相互作用 ,建立了四维基团溶解度参数体系。这 4维参数包括色散参数、极性参数、得电子参数和供电子参数 ,它们分别对应于基团的色散、极性和氢键(得电子和供电子 )作用。在此基础上定义了类溶解度参数 ,并给出了由基团溶解度参数求取类溶解度参数的计算式。利用类溶解度参数和溶解度参数之间的良好线性相关性 ,获得了根据分子的基团结构来估算溶解度参数的新方法。对于常见的各类单官能团有机物 ,这种估算的平均相对偏差在 3 %以内     

Pre-<Emphasis Type="Italic">Archaeopteryx</Emphasis> coelurosaurian dinosaurs and their implications for understanding avian origins

The last two decades have witnessed great advances in reconstructing the transition from non-avian theropods to avians, but views in opposition to the theropod hypothesis still exist. Here we highlight one issue that is often considered to raise problems for the theropod hypothesis of avian origins, i.e. the “temporal paradox” in the stratigraphic distribution of theropod fossils — the idea that the earliest known avian is from the Late Jurassic but most other coelurosaurian groups are poorly known in the Jurassic, implying that avians arose before their supposed ancestors. However, a number of Jurassic non-avian coelurosaurian theropods have recently been discovered, thus documenting the presence of most of the major coelurosaurian groups in the Jurassic alongside, or prior to, avians. These discoveries have greatly improved the congruence between stratigraphy and phylogeny for derived theropods and, effectively, they reject the “temporal paradox” concept. Most importantly, these discoveries provide significant new information that supports the relatively basal positions of the Tyrannosauroidea and Alvarezsauroidea among the Coelurosauria. Indeed, they imply a new phylogenetic hypothesis for the interrelationships of Paraves, in which Archaeopteryx, the Dromaeosauridae, and the Troodontidae form a monophyletic group while the Scansoriopterygidae, other basal birds, and probably also the Oviraptorosauria, form another clade. Mapping some of the salient features onto a temporally-calibrated theropod phylogeny indicates that characteristics related to flight and arboreality evolved at the base of the Paraves, earlier than the Late Jurassic.     

宁夏灵武直罗组植物化石及沉积岩对灵武恐龙生活时代古环境的指示

宁夏灵武直罗组植物化石及泥岩地球化学特征记录了灵武龙生活时代直罗组沉积期的地质信息。通过对灵武地区中侏罗统直罗组孢粉和植物化石的采集分析,对直罗组泥岩的常量及微量元素分析,针对该区古气候、古盐度、古氧化还原环境进行探讨并简要分析古沉积环境演化。直罗组孢粉类型以湿生为主,茎秆类植物化石大都为湿生蕨类植物,反映了当时温暖湿润的气候,相比延安组植物化石组合,直罗期开始向炎热干旱气候演化。泥岩元素地球化学分析显示从直罗组沉积早期到晚期,古气候由温湿气候逐渐变得干旱,整体处于弱还原环境,沉积环境氧化作用减弱而在直罗晚期氧化作用具增强之势,同直罗组呈微咸水相的淡水环境并且晚期水体古盐度增大一致,揭示直罗组沉积晚期相比早期气候更加干旱,且相比延安组气候开始向炎热干旱气候演化,直罗组沉积时期处于由温暖潮湿变得炎热干旱的过渡期。