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 Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 5:59 pm
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Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 6:00 pm
How this worksI got my masters degree in paleontology about a year and a half ago and now am working in the science department of a museum. YAY. I studied molecular paleontology and crocodilian evolution, adore crocodiles and their ancestors, and love helping people learn more about them and other cool paleontology topics. This game is meant to point you in the direction of some cool paleontology topics that are less known, misunderstood, or just awesome. Want to enter? Pick a favorite topic from the topic list. Write a paragraph on the topic to get a ticket into the prize raffle. Want more tickets? Feel free to write a paragraph on as many topics as you like! No rush, no pressure! Some of these questions may be more challenging. Don't worry! The Investi-Gator doesn't care about grades, just learning. As long as your answer is in the right ballpark he'll give you a ticket. Instructions: ~ Submit a form with at least 4 sentences on a topic to get a ticket. If the question is worth two tickets, your answer must be at least 6 sentences. ~ Answer as few or as many prompts as you like. It's up to you! ~ Only submit once per prompt. ~ At the end of the time period, I'll roll winners from the ticket list! Rules~ Follow all soquili rules and gaia ToS. ~ No mules or proxies allowed ~ Investi-Gator will start and end at the posted times even if I'm not around to make announcements. No late entries will be accepted. ~ Be a good sport. Disruptive or discouraging behavior will result in disqualification from the game. ~ If you make an error on the form, feel free to edit. However, if it's something large or you feel that I may have already passed you on the list, please repost. ~ You must post a new form for each topic you choose to write on. You may have multiple forms in one post. ~ Do not delete your posts. Edit your post instead if you made an error! ~ Please don’t try to be cheeky. If you post about dinosaurs and your entry reads like: “Dinosaurs are dead. They were scary. They ate bunnies.” Then you will not receive a ticket and I will be sad. ~ I love learning about religion but don't know enough about the religions of the world to approve answers stemming from them. Please base your answers in science rather than religion. ~ Do your best to be factual, but don't worry too much! If something is off in a large way, I'll let you know and give you the chance to fix it. ~ Don’t copy-paste! The Investi-gator chomps plagiarized entries. Please rewrite in your own words. The aim of this game is for people to learn cool things about prehistoric life. If you have any questions about the prompts or get confused by the information you're finding... please feel free to PM me! biggrin I love talking about ancient crocs and dinosaurs and would be happy to help and point you towards a good source or two. The form:
[size=18][color=darkred]Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?[/color][/size]
[b]Username:[/b]
[b]Prize Preferences:[/b]
[b]Prompt:[/b]
[b]What's so interesting about that?[/b] (Your paragraph here! Remember, at least 4 sentences for 1-ticket questions, 6 sentences for 2-ticket questions)
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Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 6:00 pm
PromptsQuestions worth one ticket should have answers at least 4 sentences long. Questions worth two tickets should have answers at least 6 sentences long. Don't get bogged on the details! biggrin A general answer suffices for most questions. Prompt 1  Crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gharials are all part of the order Crocodilia. What animals are the closest living evolutionary relatives to crocodilians? How do we know? (1 ticket) Prompt 2 Poposaurids and rauisuchians are very interesting branches of the crocodilian evolutionary tree. Tell me about either poposaurids or rausuchians. Tell me about both for an extra ticket! (1-2 tickets) Prompt 3 Convergent evolution is when organisms that aren't closely related evolve similar features independently. An example of this is that birds, bats, and insects all fly, but they all evolved their wings separately. Crocodiles prowl our waterways today, but animals that look and act like crocodiles have evolved independently several different times throughout the history of life. What is one example of an ancient reptile that looked and acted like a crocodile but evolved its body plan independently? Why do you think animals that look and act like crocodiles keep evolving? (1 ticket) Prompt 4 How are ancient crocodile relatives like aetosaurs, rauisuchians, and sphenosuchians different from modern day crocodilians? (1 ticket) Prompt 5 Did ancient crocodile relatives like aetosaurs, rauisuchians, and sphenosuchians play a large or a small role in Triassic ecosystems? How did they interact with dinosaurs? (1 ticket) Prompt 6 There are all sorts of different ways that bird feathers get their color. Tell me a little about the differences between pigment color and structural color in feathers. And of course... many dinosaurs had feathers too! Paleontologists have discovered preserved dinosaur feather pigments. Based on what you now know about how feathers get their color... is knowing about the pigment of dinosaur feathers enough to know what color they were? (2 tickets) Prompt 7 No useful DNA has ever been found in non-bird dinosaur fossils, however, scientists have extracted other biological molecules from dinosaur bone and tissue. What biological molecules have scientists found? (note: Please discuss something other than feather pigments) (1 ticket) Prompt 8 Sometimes paleontologists take very thin slices of dinosaur bones, called thin sections, and look at them under the microscope. They can learn a lot about dinosaur bone histology (the microscopic structure of organic tissues) this way. What cool things have paleontologists discovered about dinosaurs (or ancient crocodiles) by studying fossil bone histology? (1 ticket) Bonus Round! NOTE: You can only do this prompt after you've filled at least 4 other prompts first! What is the most interesting/surprising thing you've learned while researching these questions? (2 tickets)
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Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 6:01 pm
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Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2016 6:33 pm
This doesn't open until tomorrow... but feel free to post or PM with questions! biggrin
Even if I'm not around to officially open it, consider this open as of tomorrow (June 7th) at 7 PM EST!
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:11 pm
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:29 pm
Is there a penalty for more then a paragraph? Cause i dent to ramble when i find fun things to talk about and Dinos are very interesting and i love fossils lmao
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:34 pm
Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?
Username: Summer Raaven
Prize Preferences: 2 - 1 - 3 - 5 - 6
Prompt: Prompt #1: Crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gharials are all part of the order Crocodilia. What animals are the closest living evolutionary relatives to crocodilians? How do we know?
What's so interesting about that? The bird is the closest living evolutionary relative to crocodilians. We know this because of research that was done a few years back - involving DNA - to rearrange some of the avian on the evolutionary tree to include reptilian-like ancestors. This ancestor, the 'archosaur' was once a species that modeled after early-dinosaurs & reptiles, and avians & crocodilians are a descendants of this species. The DNA 'markers', as they're called, are easily detectable in species that were once closely related, and the American alligator & salt water crocodile have been reported to carry this very DNA strand. Because DNA in crocodilians progresses a lot slower than it does in birds, the DNA was easily found & therefore, it was concluded that they are indeed connected to each other through the archosaur. It boils down to DNA & the connection of ancestral DNA -- a lot of birds are not actually related because of the lack of DNA.
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:35 pm
Tiger_Kisa699 Is there a penalty for more then a paragraph? Cause i dent to ramble when i find fun things to talk about and Dinos are very interesting and i love fossils lmao Absolutely not! 8D Ramble away! *will read it all*
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:57 pm
Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?Username: Tiger_Kisa699 Prize Preferences:1,2,3,7,4,5,6 Prompt:2: Poposaurids and rauisuchians are very interesting branches of the crocodilian evolutionary tree. Tell me about either poposaurids or rausuchians. Tell me about both for an extra ticket! (1-2 tickets)What's so interesting about that? Poposaurids are an interesting form of Trisassic "Croc-like-archosaurs" or more specifically a pseudosuchian. Pseudosuchian is a group of animals that, today, only include Crocodiles, Alligators and Gharials. What makes them interesting is that they stood on their back legs like Dinosaurs did but were not really a dinosaur. They carried their legs under them like dinos and had the typical muscular back legs but were more closely related to Crocodiles then Dinosaurs. The first line of poposauroids that seemed to lead to the bipedal crocodiles was a toothless beaked herbivore discovered in '06 that was named Effigia. It set the ground work, that we can tell, for most of the crocodile cousins in the poposauroids family. Most of the poposauroids lines are herbivores or omnivores. The rauisuchians are part of the same family but are more predatory then its cousins. They had a larger desire to hunt meat then to settle for veggies and grass's. It still walked on two muscular legs and had smaller front arms, and like the poposaurus it was more like a crocodile than a dinosaur. (Source for info here I did my best to put into my own words. I thought best to list this mostly cause it didn't list caimans.)
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 4:59 pm
Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?
Username: Mewsings of An Angel
Prize Preferences: 3, 1, 4, 2, 6, 5
Prompt: #2
What's so interesting about that?
Poposaurids were originally found in Northern and Southern America around the Late Triassic periods. They were at first considered Theropods, but later research found them to be of a closer relation to crocodilians instead of the bipedal dinosaur that they closer resembled. Early research into the poposaurids revealed the family included Poposaurus, Postosuchus, Bromsgroveia and Teratosaurus. However, as studies continued, researchers found that Teratosaurus was a part of the rauisuchid, and not the poposaurids. Research has also determined that Postosuchus is wrongly identified and should be more considered in rauisuchid family or a prestosuchid.
Unlike poposaurids, the rauisuchid was not a bipedal creature, instead moving along on four short legs, much like current crocodiles. But unlike crocodiles, their legs are not sprawled out, and were nearly straight underneath their bodies, very near like mammals.They survived through most of the Triassic period, but died out during the extinction event that happened between the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Strangely enough, after their extinction, theropod dinosaurs were able to emerge and flourish as the sole large terrestrial predators. This is evident by the rapid growth of found footprints after they died out.
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 5:13 pm
Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?
Username: Mewsings of An Angel
Prize Preferences: 3, 1, 4, 2, 6, 5
Prompt: #1
What's so interesting about that?
Birds are the closest living relative to the crocodiles we know and love today. We know that they are related because going down the evolutionary chain, they actually share a common ancestor. The archosaur, which is the missing link along this evolutionary journey split ways - and where the birds took flight with their fast molecular evolution, crocodiles and the like slowed to a sluggish crawl. It seems that when birds took flight, many adaptations were dropped, including genetic code associated with sharp teeth and a secondary ovary.
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 5:17 pm
Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?
Username:Tiger_Kisa699
Prize Preferences:1,2,3,7,4,5,6
Prompt: 7
What's so interesting about that?
In 2014 NCSU discovered original T-Rex DNA in a thigh bone. They found transparent and pliable blood vessels that contained red blood cells from 65 million years ago. As the end of the year 2015 they added many more things to the list of discoveries, several proteins, tubulin for microtubial building, the cytoskeleton components actin, hemoglobin, tropomyosin, and the related motor protein myosin, just to name a few. They also found soft blood vessels, connective tissue, and blood cell protein amino acid chains from an 80 million year old hadrosaur skeleton at Harvard University. The tissue was from a non-fossilized hadrosaur, which is a duck billed dino. Original biological collagen was also found in a small bone from a 70 million year old marine based dino called a mosasaur.
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 5:21 pm
Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?
Username: LunaRei_SilverBlood
Prize Preferences: 2 - reroll
Prompt: 1
What's so interesting about that? Late in 2014 there was a study done that revealed the really slow genome evolution of the crocodilians. And the closest living relatives are the birds. In the study, they used bird genomes in combination with crocodilian genomes to reconstruct a partial genome of the common ancestor. The common ancestor is called the Archosaur. In the study they were able to trace the DNA from some of the Crocodilians because it moved at a slower rate, even slower than it does in birds.
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 5:29 pm
Mr. Investi-Gator! Did you know that...?
Username: Mewsings of An Angel
Prize Preferences: 3, 1, 4, 2, 6, 5
Prompt: #3
What's so interesting about that?
Phytosaurs were long-nosed and heavily armored, bearing a an almost mirrored image to modern crocodilians in their size, appearance, and lifestyle. The name "phytosaur" actually means "plant reptile", because the first fossils were thought to belong to a plant eater. The name is misleading because the sharp teeth in phytosaur jaws clearly show that they were predators. Dolichorostral, or "long-snouted" types, have a long slender snout and cone-shaped teeth that are the same throughout their mouth. These were most likely able to capture fast slippery prey, but not so good at tackling a land animal, unlike the modern-day crocodile.
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