Ranga’s Blog

Source: Rosemary Mosco, Attenborough, Bird and Moon (Jan. 2013).

A new species of horned dinosaur, called the xenoceratops—”alien horned-face”—has been discovered in fossil beds in Alberta, Canada.
The discovery is based on remains from at least three adult-sized individuals, which were identified from fossils originally collected in 1958. The creatures would have been approximately six meters long and would have weighed more than two metric [...]

A beluga whale [named Noc] has … learn[ed] to imitate human speech. … Noc was captured in 1977 when he was still a juvenile. By 1984, he was making unusual sounds. One day, a diver in his tank surfaced unexpectedly asking who had called to him to get out. It turned out that the cries [...]

[A] single specimen of the new species[, which] was originally chipped out of red rock in southern Africa in the 1960’s[, has been] discovered in a collection of fossils at Harvard University by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno, paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago.
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Named Pegomastax africanus, or “thick jaw from Africa”, the new [...]

Getting over her initial astonishment, [Julie Elliott] grabbed her mobile phone and started filming the koala as it dog-paddled across the creek, straight to her canoe. Reaching the craft, it lifted its paws and tried to clamber aboard, but the effort proved too much until Miss Elliott’s companion grabbed it and hauled it into [...]

Source: Stephan Pastis, No Comics Section, Pearls Before Swine (May 15, 2012).

Mesozoic sauropods, like many modern herbivores, are likely to have hosted microbial methanogenic symbionts for the fermentative digestion of their plant food. Today methane from livestock is a significant component of the global methane budget. Sauropod methane emission would probably also have been considerable.
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To estimate methane production we follow the relationship … for modern non-ruminant [...]

There are about 1.3 billion cows in the world today. That makes just a bit of a change from 10,500 years ago, when the first population of domesticated cattle was likely just eighty head. That’s the new finding from a team of British, French, and German researchers, who extracted DNA from cow bones found at [...]

The Supreme Court granted certiorari this morning in Harris v. Florida.  The question presented is:
Whether the Florida Supreme Court has decided an important federal question in a way that conflicts with the established Fourth Amendment precedent of this Court by holding that an alert by a well-trained narcotics detection dog certified to detect illegal contraband [...]

A seal pup wandered into someone’s home in New Zealand:
A wandering baby fur-seal wriggled through the cat-door of a Welcome Bay house - and made himself at home on the couch. … The seal had made its way from the Welcome Bay waterfront, through the suburb’s residential area, across busy Welcome Bay Rd, up a [...]