A sauropod dinosaur was named a new species around 80 years after it was first discovered in a remote Colombian mountain range, thanks to the 2016 Peace Agreement, which put an end to half a century of civil war. Around 175 million years ago, a 12-metre long sauropod walked northern Colombia. Scientists are attributing the discovery of this new species of herbivorous dinosaur to the improved security situation in Colombia since the signing of the 2016 peace deal. Two years after the signing of the agreement, a group of researchers from the Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, and the University of Michigan, US, found it safe to visit the Serranía del Perijá, and gather new data. The scientists returned to the place where a fossil of a dinosaur dorsal spine vertebra was found by a geologist working for an oil company in 1943. At the time no one knew that it was part of a brand-new species. After the find, the fossil was taken, along with some sediment samples, to the US and given to the University of California scientific collection at Berkeley. "Without the security conditions provided in the area today, it would have been difficult to return to the field. This is due to the peace agreement," Aldo Rincón Burbano, professor at the Department of Physics and Geosciences at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla and one of the research leaders in Colombia, told UN News. Former FARC-EP fighters provided logistical services, lodging, and guides for the researchers, as they tried to locate the site where the fossil had been unearthed some 80 years earlier. Also read: Extinct dinosaur lectures world leaders about climate change "We spent almost a year in the process, writing and searching, and although we didn't find any new fossils, we managed to get to the site and find the same sediment collected alongside the vertebra in 1943," said Rincón. "By studying the sediment, we were able to conclude that the vertebra was from a new genus and a new species." They named the species Perijasaurus lapaz – the first part after the place where it was found and the second as a tribute to the peace agreement. The dinosaur is similar to other sauropods of this period found in Asia, North Africa, and southern Patagonia, which were smaller than the later dinosaurs belonging to this group. Also read: Footprints show some two-legged dinosaurs were agile

The coelacanth — a giant weird fish still around from dinosaur times — can live for 100 years, a new study found. These slow-moving, people-sized fish of the deep, nicknamed a “living fossil,” are the opposite of the live fast, die young mantra. These nocturnal fish grow at an achingly slow pace. Females don’t hit sexual maturity until their late 50s, the study said, while male coelacanths are sexually mature at 40 to 69 years. And maybe strangest of all, researchers figure pregnancy in the fish lasts about five years. Also read: Researchers discover fossils of new species in Arizona Coelacanths, which have been around for 400 million years, were thought extinct until they were found alive in 1938 off South Africa. Scientists long believed coelacanths live about 20 years. But by applying a standard technique for dating commercial fish, French scientists calculated they actually live close to a century, according to a study in Thursday’s Current Biology. Coelacanths are so endangered that scientists can only study specimens already caught and dead. In the past, scientists calculated fish ages by counting big lines on a specific coelacanth scale. But the French scientists found they were missing smaller lines that could only be seen using polarized light — the technique used to figure out the age of commercial fish. Study co-author Bruno Ernande, a marine evolutionary ecologist at France’s marine research institute, said polarized light revealed five smaller lines for every big one. The researchers concluded the smaller lines better correlated to a year of coelacanth age — and that indicated their oldest specimen was 84 years old. Using the technique, the scientists studied two embryos and calculated the largest was five years old and the youngest was nine years old. So, Ernande said, they figured pregnancy lasts at least five years in coelacanths, which have live births. Also read: Rare fishing cat captured in Chattogram village That five-year gestation is “very strange” for fish or any animal, said Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Harold Walker, who wasn’t part of the research. Even though coelacanths are unrelated genetically and show wide evolutionary differences, they age slowly like other dwellers of the deep, sharks and rays, Ernande said. “They might have evolved similar life histories because they are sharing similar type habitats,” he said.

One Tyrannosaurus rex seems scary enough. Now picture 2.5 billion of them. That’s how many of the fierce dinosaur king probably roamed Earth over the course of a couple million years, a new study finds. Using calculations based on body size, sexual maturity and the creatures’ energy needs, a team at the University of California, Berkeley figured out just how many T. rex lived over 127,000 generations, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science. It’s a first-of-its-kind number, but just an estimate with a margin of error that is the size of a T. rex. Also read:Dinosaur-killing asteroid strike gave rise to Amazon rainforest “That’s a lot of jaws,” said study lead author Charles Marshall, director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. “That’s a lot of teeth. That’s a lot of claws.” The species roamed North America for about 1.2 million to 3.6 million years, meaning the T. rex population density was small at any one moment. There would be about two in a place the size of the Washington, D.C., or 3,800 in California, the study said. “Probably like a lot of people, I literally did a double-take to make sure that my eyes hadn’t deceived me when I first read that 2.5 billion T. rexes have ever lived,” said Macalester College paleobiologist Kristi Curry Rogers, who wasn’t part of the study. Marshall said the estimate helps scientists figure the preservation rate of T. rex fossils and underscores how lucky the world is to know about them at all. About 100 or so T. rex fossils have been found — 32 of them with enough material to figure they are adults. If there were 2.5 million T. rex instead of 2.5 billion, we would probably have never known they existed, he said. Marshall’s team calculated the population by using a general biology rule of thumb that says the bigger the animal, the less dense its population. Then they added estimates of how much energy the carnivorous T. rex needed to stay alive — somewhere between a Komodo dragon and a lion. The more energy required, the less dense the population. They also factored in that the T. rex reached sexual maturity somewhere around 14 to 17 years old and lived at most 28 years. Also read:New dinosaur species "dancing dragon" identified in China Given uncertainties in the creatures’ generation length, range and how long they roamed, the Berkeley team said the total population could be as little as 140 million or as much as 42 billion with 2.4 billion as the middle value.

Beijing, Oct. 8 (Xinhua/UNB) -- Paleontologists announced Tuesday in Beijing they had discovered a group of 100-million-year-old fossils of dinosaur footprints in east China's Zhejiang Province.