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All the colours of the rainbow, plus oneResearchers have fired lasers directly into the eye to stimulate photoreceptors, and produce the perception of a colour that does not exist in nature. They describe it as a “supersaturated teal,” and hope the technique will allow them to better understand colour vision and perhaps lead to treatments for vision problems. Austin Roorda has been developing this technology using mirrors, lasers and optical devices. He is a professor of Optometry and Vision Science at University of California, Berkeley. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.Following in the footsteps of an ancient ankylosaurPaleontologists have found fossil footprints of an armoured dinosaur in the Canadian Rockies that fill in a critical gap in the fossil record. The footprints belonged to a club-tailed ankylosaur about five to six metres long, and are the first evidence of this type of dinosaur living in North America in a period known as the middle Cretaceous. The research was led by Victoria Arbour, curator of paleontology at the Royal B.C. Museum, and published in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology.Did the Neanderthals die from sunburn?Neanderthals disappeared 40,000 years ago, and new research suggests this corresponds to a period of weakness in the Earth's magnetic field that allowed an increase in the solar radiation reaching the surface. Researchers think they have evidence that modern humans were able to protect themselves from the sun better than Neanderthals could, and this might have contributed to the Neanderthal extinction. Raven Garvey is an anthropologist at the University of Michigan. Her team's research was published in the journal Science. Cloudy with a chance of ammonia mushballsNew observations and models of activity within Jupiter's stormy atmosphere is giving a weather report for the giant planet, and it's pretty extreme. Most interestingly, researchers predict conditions that could lead to violent lightning storms producing softball sized frozen ammonia “mushballs” that would rain through the upper atmosphere. The research was led by Chris Moeckel, a planetary scientist and aerospace engineer at the University of California-Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, and was published in the journal Science Advances.Shattering heat records: climate change is turning out to be worse than expectedIn the last few years, we've seen global temperatures rising faster, with more extreme localized heatwaves, than climate models predicted. Climate scientists are trying to understand this by investigating the underlying factors behind these heating trends. Richard Allan, from the University of Reading in the U.K., was expecting a larger than normal rise in global temperatures due to natural fluctuations, but global temperatures in 2023 and 2024 were much higher than expected. Their recent study in the journal Environmental Research Letters found a growing imbalance in the earth's heat system, with increasingly more heat coming in than leaving, in large part due to changes we've seen in global cloud cover.This global heating is not happening evenly around the world. Kai Kornhuber, from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria and Columbia Climate School in New York, found regional hotspots that are experiencing unexpected extreme heat, likely due to a combination of factors. That study is in the journal PNAS.
Trudie Mason, Dr. Victoria Arbour, John Moore, Tom Mulcair, Dr. Mitch Shulman, Jeannot Painchaud, Mary Silviaggio
Dr. Victoria Arbour, curator of palaeontology at the Royal BC Museum, spoke to Andrew Carter about finding dinosaur bones in places in British Columbia where they shouldn't be.
Victoria is a vertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist and is the leading expert on the palaeobiology of the armoured dinosaurs known as ankylosaurs. She has named several new species of ankylosaurs, studied how they used and evolved their charismatic armour and weaponry, and investigated how their biogeography was shaped by dispersals between Asia and North America. British Columbia has a rich fossil record spanning over 500 million years of the history of life on Earth. Victoria's research at the Royal BC Museum will investigate how the ancient plants and animals that lived here responded to changing climates, shifting continents, and mass extinctions. The Carbon Creek Basin site is located just west of Hudson's Hope in the Peace River area and boasts nearly 1,200 dinosaur tracks from at least 12 different types of dinosaurs—including two dinosaur track types that have not been observed at any other site in the Peace Region
Episode 22 closes off the year 2022. Here is the yearly postcard from TetZooCon, in podcast form! The UK's biggest event of Our People, organized by that man Naish and presumably other people, was held early December at the Bush House in London. It was a palaeo-heavy conference, with lots of dinosaur and especially pterosaur talks, the yearly palaeoart workshop, lots of attention for the Crystal Palace Dinosaurs and the launches (or re-launches) of some significant books. And this time, you can hear all about it! Niels, Marc and Natee did not only attend the event, but took the time to interview a whole bunch of people there, from speakers, familiar names, palaeoartists, authors and regular - as well as not irregular - attendees. So enjoy this lavish episode full of news and remeniscence, featuring Darren Naish ,Victoria Arbour, Dougal Dixon, Natalia Jagielska, C. M. Kosemen and a whole bunch of others. Show notes at Chasmosaurs.com
Ankylosaurs go clubbing. Armoured dinosaurs with tail weapons fought each other Ankylosaurs were squat, armoured living tanks with long tails tipped by a wicket bony club. And new research suggests that they used that weapon not just to defend against predators like T.rex, but to smash against each other in contests that might have been about mates, food or territory. Victoria Arbour, of the Royal BC Museum, led the work, which was published in Biology Letters Fiddlesticks! Researchers find swearing sounds are shared across languages By comparing curses across many languages a team of researchers thinks they've found common ground in bad language. Universally, it seems, curse words avoid the sounds associated with the letters L, R, W and Y. Shiri Lev-Ari, who studies languages at Royal Holloway, University of London, found you can tell a swear word when you hear one from how it sounds, even if you don't have a ‘frakking' clue what it means. Her research was published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. DNA from two million years ago provides a picture of a unique ancient ecosystem DNA recovered from the soil in northern Greenland, which today is an arctic desert, paints a picture of a 2-million-year-old ecosystem unlike any other on Earth, rich with plant and animal life. Professor Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist from the University of Cambridge and his colleagues, collected the samples from northern Greenland back in 2006. It took years for them to figure out extract the ancient DNA from the minerals in the soil and for new methods to sequence and identify tiny bits of very badly damaged genetic material to be developed. This groundbreaking finding, was published in the journal Nature. It IS all about the bass – researchers break down what in the music moves us Researchers have found that adding inaudible bass tones to music during a concert increases how much people dance. Neuroscientist Daniel Cameron used McMaster University's LiveLab, which is part concert hall, part laboratory, to throw a concert with the band Orphx. During the show the researchers randomly added super low frequencies throughout. When those frequencies were on, concert-goers wearing motion capture headbands would dance 12 per cent more than when the frequencies were absent. The research was published in the journal Current Biology. Is it too late for Nuclear fusion? Nuclear fusion has been touted as a potential solution to all of our energy needs for decades, but progress towards controlled, energy producing fusion power has been painfully slow. In the meantime renewable energy, particularly solar, also promises to meet our needs, and has made tremendous technical and commercial progress and growth. Freelance broadcaster Moira Donovan looks at some recent developments in fusion and solar, and tries to answer the question, is it too late for fusion power?
Alan Carter talks with Dr Victoria Arbour, Curator of Paleontology at the Royal BC Museum, RE: They Want to Break T. Rex Into 3 Species. Paleontologists Aren't Pleased
This is a between-series BONUS that was previous released to Patrons on Patreon. In it a palaeontologist makes up for Dave’s inadequacies when dealing with the ornithischians. So welcome Dr Victoria Arbour of the Royal BC Museum of Victoria, Canada to talk with Dave and Iszi about the armoured dinosaurs, the ankylosaurs. She is a world expert on this amazing and unfairly overlooked group and joins us to talk through their origins, evolution and weird features – not just the famous armour and tail clubs, but also their convoluted noses too. Victoria has published numerous papers on these animals including naming several species, first and foremost among them for Terrible Lizards listeners being Zuul, the animal that guest Ralph Attanasia (S1, E4) turned into a life-sized cake. Links: Pseudoplocephalus is Victoria’s blog https://pseudoplocephalus.com Love in the Time of Chasmosaurs is a popular dinosaur website where Victoria is an occasional contributor https://chasmosaurs.com/about/ Some photos of the amazing Scleidosaurus specimen that is mentioned during the podcast https://archosaurmusings.wordpress.com/2011/01/28/a-super-scleidosaurus/
Say hello to Ferrisaurus sustutensis — “A new leptoceratopsid dinosaur from Maastrichtian-aged deposits of the Sustut Basin, northern British Columbia, Canada." You may recall Dr. Victoria Arbour, curator of palaeontology at the Royal BC Museum from her work on ankylosaurs & that interesting specimen from Hornby Island thought to be a pterosaur but further study revealed to be a saurodontid fish — an ambush predator with very sharp serrated teeth and elongate, torpedo-like body. Not a pterosaur but still a massively exciting find. Arbour was very gracious about the new interpretation, taking it in stride. She has since gone on to name this partial ornithischian dinosaur from Sustut Basin, as well as the ankylosaurs Zuul, Zaraapelta, Crichtonpelta, and Ziapelta. She's been a busy bee. For this latest find, she's partnered up & published her findings with David Evans from the Royal Ontario Museum in the peer-reviewed scientific journal PeerJ - the Journal of Life and Environmental Sciences. Their paper describes this partial dinosaur skeleton found amongst the inhospitable boreal forests and folded rock of the Canadian Cordillera near the Sustut Basin of northern British Columbia, Canada. The news deserves some fanfare. While Alberta, our sister province to the east is practically littered with dinosaur remains, they are relatively rare in BC. This is the first unique non-avian dinosaur species reported from British Columbia.
Victoria Arbour, from the Royal B.C. Museum, speaks with Daybreak host Faith Fundal about her Ankylosaurian species find.
In today's show I help tee up the annual Remembrance Day Ceremony set for Monday in Kamloops. I am joined by the President of Kamloops Legion Branch 52. The Royal B.C. Museum's curator of paleontology Victoria Arbour joins me to discuss a new dinosaur that has been discovered that is unique to BC, the Ferrisaurus. And the 1st Vice-President of the Kamloops-Thompson Teachers Association comes on to talk class sizes in the district.
Dinosaur of the day Gryphoceratops, a tiny Canadian cousin of Triceratops. In dinosaur news this week: A new article shows that Spinosaurus probably couldn't swim effectively, but was a capable bipedal walker on land Victoria Arbour is the new curator of paleontology at the Royal British Columbia Museum Dickinson Dinosaur Museum has continued excavating a tyrannosaur and hadrosaur in the Judith River Formation in Montana Juvenile hadrosaurs bones have been found in the Spring Creek bone bed near the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum in Grande Prairie The Queensland Museum in Australia is 3D scanning its collection of fossils and will share its research with Australian students and international scientists Dinosaur Hill in Fruita, Colorado has some new signs to teach people about the historical importance of the area Ohio State University’s Orton Hall Museum is getting a Cryolophosaurus cast to display on October 7 Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History in Texas has some new fossils, including a full sized cast of a Triceratops skull From now until September 9, you can see the “Tyrannosaurus Exhibit: The mystery of evolution” at the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum in Naha, Japan The Bolton Museum in Bolton, UK, recently officially nicknamed their Tuojiangosaurus skeleton "Jango" Smithsonian Mag wrote an elegy for Hatcher the Triceratops which will soon be on display being eaten by a T. rex A list of dinosaur games includes Magic School Bus: Dinosaurs, Dinosaur Island, Jurassic Park: Danger, Dino Frontier, and Ark: Survival Evolved. The new game, Jurassic World VR Expedition is available to play in Dave & Busters According to J.A. Bayona, E.T. inspired the really sad Brachiosaurus death scene in Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom A group of US military veterans made a Jurassic World fan film called "Jurassic World Exodus" This episode is brought to you in part by TRX Dinosaurs, which makes beautiful and realistic dinosaur sculptures, puppets, and animatronics. You can see some amazing examples and works in progress on Instagram @trxdinosaurs To get access to lots of patron only content check out https://www.patreon.com/iknowdino For links to every news story, all of the details we shared about Gryphoceratops, and our fun fact check out https://iknowdino.com/Gryphoceratops-Episode-195/
Victoria Arbour is an evolutionary biologist and vertebrate palaeontologist studying the evolution of dinosaurs. She currently studies ankylosaurs, a group of armoured dinosaurs often known for their tail weapons. Over the course of her career, she's investigated the biomechanics of tail clubbing in ankylosaurian dinosaurs through mathematical modeling and finite element analysis.Don't forget to subscribe to the Curiosity in Focus podcast on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and Google Play Music!Support the Curiosity in Focus podcast on Patreon at patreon.com/curiosityinfocus and by purchasing the Stay Curious merch line at designbyhumans.com/shop/curiosityinfocusTwitter @danielhkwanInstagram @danielhkwan & @curiosityinfocusYouTube: youtube.com/curiosityinfocusFacebook: facebook.com/curiosityinfocusZuul, Destroyer of Shins at the Royal Ontario MuseumVictoria's blog, PseudoplocephalusVictoria's latest academic publication - The evolution of tail weaponization in amniotesYi Qi, the dinosaur with bat-like wingsThe Carolina Butcher Dino 101 of CourseraBulbasaurus, the dinosaur Pokemon?
Today we talk about our art doppelgängers and why some states won't allow the Google Arts & Culture app. Hear about the Bratz dolls war with Barbie, and why it reveals a lot about intellectual property, race, culture, and even the #metoo movement. We discuss how Capetown is running out of water and the world is running out of sand. We are furious about a Skittles conspiracy that reveals the way we experience food. Plus, we talk to postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum, Dr. Victoria Arbour, about dinosaurs, being a woman in a male-dominated field, and evolution. Today's show is brought to you by Zola, for a $50 credit towards your wedding registry, go to ZOLA.com/braincandy. For $20 off the amazing bedding at Brooklinen, go to brooklinen.com and use code BRAINCANDY at checkout. And for free access to the Beach Body platform, text BRAINCANDY to 303030.
Ankylosaurs are a group of non-avian dinosaurs best known for their armour, tank-like bodies, and sometimes large tail clubs. First appearing in the Jurassic, they were common in Late Cretaceous ecosystems, with several species known from around the world. But how different were these species really? And just where did they evolve from? What was that tail for? Dr. Victoria Arbour of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences is one of the leading experts on ankylosaurs, and has published a number of papers, including a recent study on how the tail club evolved. We spoke with Victoria about these dinosaurs and she answered some of these questions for us.