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From both dinosaurs age and much more recent cave paintings

From USA the new dinosaurus Jimmadseni is a carnivorous predator 5 millions years older than Allosaurus Fragilis

The paleontologists of the Natural History Museum of Utah and other scholars have classified a new dinosaur species the Allosaurus jimmadseni, (name that combines the dinosaur genus with a word that is derived from the surname of the discoverer, James H. Madsen Jr.), characterized by the fact of being carnivorous and having particular bony ridges that run from the eyes to the nose.

Jimmadseni inhabited the flood plains of western North America and lived during the Late Jurassic Period (between 157 and 152 million years ago).

Considerable discovery considering that it is the oldest known species of Allosaurus, preceding even the best known Allosaurus fragilis, also typical of Utah and very far from Allosaurus europaeus found in Europe.

Allosaurus

The new species of fossil therefore belongs to the Allosaurus group, a group of biped carnivorous dinosaurs that lived between the Jurassic and the Cretaceous whose name means “strange lizard” or something similar, but the Jimmadseni besides being the largest predatory species and more common than the ecosystem to which it belonged, it evolved no less than 5 million years before Fragilis .

The Jimmadseni is a dinosaur that has several typical characteristics including a short and narrow skull with low facial crests that extend from the horns in front of the eyes to the nose and having a relatively narrow back of the skull with a flat surface in the lower part under the eyes.

The skull was weaker and allows for a narrower field of view than that of his younger cousin Allosaurus fragilis.

Jimmadseni

In the margin, paleontologists assume that there are somewhere between one and twelve species of Allosaurus in the sequence of sedimentary rocks known as the Morrison Formation (USA).

As for the size of the Jurassic animal, the Allosaurus jimmadseni was between 8 and 9 meters (between 26 and 29 feet) and had to weigh on 4000 pounds or 18 quintals.

Over the past twenty years, the authors of the American Allosaurus study have conducted a morphologically detailed study of what could be considered as all the material about the North American Allosaurus, including important new features that give a new light on the morphology of this dinosaur.

Given the abundance of data available now on Allosaurus, scholars will present their analyzes in publications of various types, as announced in the article Cranial anatomy of Allosaurus jimmadseni

In short, the study on the morphology of the skull , which was mentioned in reference to the bone crests, is only one of those announced on this topic.

The paleontology studies are always interesting, on the one hand can be confusing, requiring the reader a certain cognitive autonomy achieved through scientific knowledge and at the same time are also good for the kids enthralled in original manner than before, with an interest, you might say, not yet corrupted by modernity.

Paleontology can help us to create a more detailed and more truthful vision of the past of our planet, as well as to understand in more depth the biology of prehistoric creatures by approaching more and more likely the origin of life on planet Earth .

We are therefore waiting to learn more from the past and in the meantime the desire to see also much younger rock paintings somewhere in the world subsides, do we dust Jurassic Park off the shelf?

Rock paintings

Rock paintings are the oldest known form of drawing and symbolize the passage from prehistory to history.

From the period in which there is no written evidence to the one in which instead there are artificial finds, rudimentary drawings that usually depict animals and hunting scenes with stylized animals and men armed with spears or casts of hands, sometimes of female figures, of venus fertility or fail.

Stylization in itself shows the passage to conceptualization and is symbolic of the activity of the poietic imagination, the creative act of depicting something that can be understood by others, becomes written language, still in a completely rudimentary form.

We are still far from the forms of vocal sound reproduction and therefore far from the actual writing with the encoding and decoding of the message that they carry with them, however the road that leads to the creation of phonetic symbols (alphabet) and grammar for writing articulated, is embarked.

The cave paintings date back to a long time ago, we are talking about old drawings of about 40 thousand or 45 thousand years.

For me the cave paintings are of a beauty that I would define original, because they drag us to the origin of us men.

They communicate a sense of strength and sacredness, one has the sensation of seeing something truly alive, more alive and full of energy than any other pictorial or artistic work.

Climate changes

News of May 2021, many cave paintings are at risk of decay, climate change is damaging several sites where the drawings of cavemen were found, therefore according to the opinion of many experts, the risk of these drawings being lost is tangible.

The recently published study shows how primitive paintings such as those of South Sulawesi (in Indonesia) of human hands stenciled with red pigments, but also many paintings in the old continent risk being irreparably damaged.

Australian and Indonesian scientists make it known after having examined eleven sites of rock paintings, it would be the salt that detaches the most superficial layer of the rock, that is the one on which there are the precious paintings.

The detachment process would be caused by the climatic acceleration, or by the alternation of wet and dry periods in a more significant way than in the past.


Italian readers are kindly invited to visit page 2

I lettori in lingua italiana sono gentilemente invitati a visitare pagina 2


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