* Astronomy

A lifelong obsession with fossils led to Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grantee Robert Reisz discovering the oldest known dinosaur embryos and the oldest known reptile that stands on two legs.
Now, he is being honoured for more than 35 years of research excellence by joining the ranks of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The society will induct him as a fellow during its annual conference, being held from Feb. 15 to 19 in San Francisco.

"I am humbled that they chose me, and I think it was because my research has had an impact in my field.  I like to look at the very beginnings of major evolutionary events – to that time when mammals and reptiles and birds were just becoming separate from each other. It was an exciting time in history, about 270 million years ago – it was between ice ages, just like the time we are living in now – and I think my work has led to a greater understanding of what happened then" - Robert Reisz, palaeontologist at the University of Toronto.

Reisz earned three degrees in zoology at McGill University during the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in a doctorate in 1975. After spending a year at UCLA, he began research at the University of Toronto under an NSERC grant. He has remained at the university, continually funded by NSERC, ever since.
His research has spanned several countries, including Russia, Germany, the United States and Canada. His most recent discovery – finding 190-million-year-old dinosaur embryos in South Africa in 2005 – is part of a time period that is about 100 million years younger than the one he usually studies.

"I had a special research opportunity through NSERC to pursue this, and never expected it would be that successful. In fact, there will soon be an interpretive centre at the site where we found the embryos – the Golden Gate Highlands National Park in South Africa. It certainly is an honour to be recognised for my work."

Source : Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council

Early humans could never have come into contact with the giant carnivorous "terror bird" Titanis walleri, research suggests.
It had been thought the fearsome beasts became extinct as little as 10,000 years ago - a time when humans shared their North American habitat.
But a US team has now revised this date to about two million years earlier.
The study, published in Geology, also sheds light on the flightless birds' migration to North America.

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A University of Florida-led study has determined that Titanis walleri, a prehistoric 7-foot-tall flightless “terror bird,” arrived in North America from South America long before a land bridge connected the two continents.
UF palaeontologist Bruce MacFadden said his team used an established geochemical technique that analyses rare earth elements in a new application to revise the ages of terror bird fossils in Texas and Florida, the only places in North America where the species has been found. Rare earth elements are a group of naturally occurring metallic elements that share similar chemical and physical properties.

“It was previously thought that Titanis immigrated to Texas across the Panamanian land bridge that formed about 3 million years ago connecting North and South America. But the rare earth element analysis of a fossil Titanis bone from Texas determines its age to be 5 million years old. This shows that the bird arrived 2 million years before the land bridge formed, probably across islands that formed what today is the Isthmus of Panama” -  Bruce MacFadden, a curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at University of Florida.

The study will be published Jan. 23 in the online version of the journal Geology and featured in its February print edition.

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When the Wright Brothers first took to the sky in a biplane, they were using a design nature may have tried 125 million years earlier. A new study of one of the earliest feathered dinosaurs suggests it may have had upper and lower sets of wings, much like the biplanes of early aviation. Today, the biplane is widely considered an old-fashioned rarity.
And the design is no longer seen in birds, though it's not clear if it was a step on the way to modern birds or a dead end, tested by nature and discarded.
The intriguing possibility of a biplane dinosaur - Microraptor gui - is suggested by Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University in this week's online issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Microraptor was described by Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003 as having aerodynamic feathers on both its arms and legs. Xu suggested at the time that it glided, extending its legs backward so its wings were arranged one behind the other, like a dragonfly.
But that would be aerodynamically inefficient for a feathered creature, Chatterjee concluded, noting that the feathers on the legs would not face forward.
Instead, he suggested, the legs of the two-pound creature could have been held below the body in flight, creating two staggered wing sections, the upper one slightly ahead of the lower one.
One other flying dinosaur, Pedopenna, also had feathers on its legs, and modern raptors such as falcons have short feathers on their upper legs which reduce air resistance as they fly.
Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said the question focuses on what the legs can do, and it's a difficult problem because the fossils are flat and require interpretation as to what they would have looked like in three dimensions.
Carrano, who also was not part of Chatterjee's research team, said this creature was probably a side branch rather than a stage evolution had to pass through on the way to today's birds.

Source: PNAS