Friday, January 23, 2015

Dr. Steve's New Dinosaurs of 2015



Just like he is every year, Dr. Steve Stevenson, chief geneticist of Animal Adventures Institute (AAI), a division of Animal Adventures Inc. is at it again! Over the past several months since Dr. Samuel Adamson brought back dinosaur fossils from his latest fossil excavation, Dr. Steve and his assistant Oliver Oviraptor have been hard at work cloning a pair of new dinosaurs. The two new dinosaurs that were released from the institute this year are Edmontosaurus annectens and Nanshiungosaurus brevispinus. Edmontosaurus, I've heard of, but I'm unable to say the same about Nanshiungosaurus.

After struggling and failing to pronounce Nan-she-ung-oh-soar-us, I found out my trusty, junior photographer, Daniel P. Smithwater, was feeling a bit sick (there's this nasty bug going around Animal Adventures Inc.), so Lizzy the Lizard came along with me as my photographer to interview Dr. Steve Stevenson at this laboratory. “I'm really excited to have finally cloned the Edmontosaurus,” Dr. Steve says, “I mean, I've literally been trying for years – Years! – to clone this beast. The problem was that even though over the years, Dr. Sam has been finding several Edmontosaurus skeletons (they're very common in the Hell Creek Formation), he never found any with enough Edmontosaurus DNA to use in cloning.”

For those of you who don't know, Edmontosaurus is a large herbivorous hadrosaur – duckbilled dinosaur – from western North America. The Edmontosaurus Dr. Steve cloned has been named Edward (“Eddy” for short) and is 30 feet long, 3 tons in weight and stands 17 feet tall on two legs. He has a broad duck-like bill for eating a wide variety of plants. Paleontologists believe Edmontosaurus lived in large herds of consisting of adults and their young. Fossils reveal that Edmontosaurus was a favorite food of Tyrannosaurus rex.

Oliver is quoted for saying, “The other dinosaur we cloned was a Nanshiungosaurus. It was a therizinosaur from China. We didn't have any Nanshiungosaurus fossils in our collection; instead, we retrieved its DNA from a mosquito embedded in amber we have in the fossil and amber storage room...[we] grabbed a random piece of amber and extracted the DNA from the mosquito inside. We were really excited to see what species we would clone.”

Nanshiungosaurus (named Ning) was 15 feet long and weighed 1,323 pounds. Other than the long neck and pot-belly, Nanshiungosaurus' most striking feature is no doubt the long claws on the hand, used for defense and obtaining tree leaves to eat. Therizinosaurs have been somewhat of a mystery to paleontologists, as it wasn't until recently that we've had skeletons of these animals to study. Before skeletons were discovered, scientists had only fossils of the claws and thought therizinosaurs were ferocious predators. Now we know otherwise.

“I am very excited that we were able to bring these amazing beasts back to life,” Dr. Steve said. “And just wait, because we'll have some equally cool creatures cloned next year!”

Written by: Mr. Smiley
Photographer: Daniel P. Smithwater
Edited by: Christian Ryan


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