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Fossil of Ant-Eating Dinosaur Discovered In China
thomst writes "Charles Q. Choi of LiveScience reports that a farmer in southern Henan Province in China has dug up the first known ant-eating dinosaur, a half-meter-long theropod (the dinosaur family to which T. Rex belongs), whose fossilized remains were described as 'fairly intact'. The 83- to 89-million-year-old pygmy dinosaur has been named named Xixianykus zhangi by Xig Xu, De-you Wang, Corwin Sullivan, David Hone, Feng-lu Han, Rong-hao Yan, and Fu-ming Du, whose paper on the critter, A basal parvicursorine (Theropoda: Alvarezsauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous of China, was published in the March 29 issue of Zootaxa (the abstract is available in PDF format for free, the full article is paywall-protected.)"
Ancestral Insects are much, much older than dinosaurs, and have a much more diverse and interesting history. Unfortunately, as in the modern era, if it's not a vertebrate it doesn't have the national-geographic wow factor.
Slow down son, not eating ants? I guess by 30k ants per day they mean termites. Extant means present *today* btw.
No, Yahoo is blocking direct access to the print version of the article. Remove "print" from the end of the URL and it will work.
Better known as 318230.
Here. Apparently the submitter wanted to provide a link to a print view, but it only works when redirected from an intermediate [Print] link in the article itself :/.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
This is biology we're talking about, "all" almost never holds. Most insect diversity then (like now) was probably under 1cm in size.
only infrmatn esentil to understandn mst b tranmitd
he could be dumb white trailer trash.
The proper name is "cracker".
Or, he might not be dumb at all, and simply an unfortunate victim of the American public school system.
I believe the proper terminology for that is "functionally idiotic". Not dumb, but you can't tell the difference.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
He's probably thinking of the aardvark, numbat, echidna, or pangolin, which are all colloquially known as "anteaters" but don't eat ants and aren't in the same family.
To be fair, anteaters do eat mostly termites, not ants.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
You need to go to slashdot preferences -> classic index -> slashboxes and uncheck "Chinese farts". I had it accidentally set and was getting, like 2 billion fart stories a day.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I mean given that people often confuse ant-eaters and aardvarks for each other. At least one species of ant-eater is actually quite dangerous. More specifically the giant ant-eater can and has killed people. (Of course being more than 100 lbs and having claws several inches long that it uses to rip into ant mounts that are as hard as concrete that's not that much of a surprise.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_ant_eater
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.