Brazilian paleontologists last week proudly put on display a skeleton of a crocodile that roamed the earth in the time of the dinosaurs 90 million years ago.
The remains of the Baurusuchus salgadoensis were well preserved and included a complete head, said Pedro Henrique Nobre from the University of Rio department of geology, where the presentation was held.
"Finding a fossil is rare, but finding a collection of fossils [from the same animal] is even more rare and finding an intact head is extraordinary," Nobre said.
PHOTO: AP
The Baurusuchus was 3.5m long, and scientists estimate it weighed 400kg.
The paleontologists also presented a life-size reconstruction of what they believe the creature looked like.
The Baurusuchus remains were found 15 years ago in the western region of the state of Sao Paulo. It is the first time they have gone on display after years of restoration.
Unlike modern-day crocodiles, the Baurusuchus lived on land in a dry area. The location of the creature's nasal pasages indicated that it could not spend much time underwater, Nobre said.
The reptile had longer and more powerful rear legs than modern crocodiles, and the animal's teeth indicte that it was an active predator, he added.
The Baurusuchus belongs to the same family of ancient reptiles whose remains have been found in Argentina, southern Africa and the region between India and Pakistan. The scientists said their discovery suggests that an ancient land bridge linked South America to Indo-Pakistan.
The creature lived in the Cretaceous period, which lasted from 144 to 65 million years ago. It was the last period during which dinosaurs lived.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS