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Algoasaurus
''Algoasaurus'' (; "Algoa Bay reptile") is a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Berriasian- early Valanginian-age Early Cretaceous Upper Kirkwood Formation of Cape Province, South Africa, specifically near a town called Despatch. Discovery and naming The holotype, a cervical vertebra, femur, an ungual phalanx and a scapula, was recovered in 1903 from a quarry in Despatch, Eastern Cape which exposed part of the Upper Kirkwood Formation by workmen who did not recognize them as dinosaur specimens, so many of the bones, probably including the rest of the once near-complete holotype, were made into bricks and thus destroyed;Broom, R. (1904)On the occurrence of an opisthocoelian dinosaur (''Algoasaurus Bauri'') in the Cretaceous beds of South Africa.''Geological Magazine'', decade 5, 1(483):445-447. it is possible that bricks in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality may still contain parts of the ''Algoasaurus'' holotype. According to Broom (1904), the Port Elizabeth Mu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eusauropod
Eusauropoda (meaning "true sauropods") is a derived clade of sauropod dinosaurs. Eusauropods represent the node-based group that includes all descendant sauropods starting with the basal eusauropods of ''Shunosaurus'', and possibly ''Barapasaurus'', and ''Amygdalodon'', but excluding ''Vulcanodon'' and ''Rhoetosaurus''. The Eusauropoda was coined in 1995 by Paul Upchurch to create a monophyletic new taxonomic group that would include all sauropods, except for the vulcanodontids. Eusauropoda are herbivorous, quadrupedal, and have long necks. They have been found in South America, Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and Africa. The temporal range of Eusauropoda ranges from the early Jurassic to the Latest Cretaceous periods. The most basal forms of eusauropods are not well known and because the cranial material for the ''Vulcanodon'' is not available, and the distribution of some of these shared derived traits that distinguish Eusauropoda is still completely clear. Description ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eusauropoda
Eusauropoda (meaning "true sauropods") is a derived clade of sauropod dinosaurs. Eusauropods represent the node-based group that includes all descendant sauropods starting with the basal eusauropods of ''Shunosaurus'', and possibly ''Barapasaurus'', and ''Amygdalodon'', but excluding ''Vulcanodon'' and ''Rhoetosaurus''. The Eusauropoda was coined in 1995 by Paul Upchurch to create a monophyletic new taxonomic group that would include all sauropods, except for the vulcanodontids. Eusauropoda are herbivorous, quadrupedal, and have long necks. They have been found in South America, Europe, North America, Asia, Australia, and Africa. The temporal range of Eusauropoda ranges from the early Jurassic to the Latest Cretaceous periods. The most basal forms of eusauropods are not well known and because the cranial material for the ''Vulcanodon'' is not available, and the distribution of some of these shared derived traits that distinguish Eusauropoda is still completely clear. Descriptio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kirkwood Formation
The Kirkwood Formation is a geological formation found in the Eastern and Western Cape provinces in South Africa. It is one of the four formations found within the Uitenhage Group of the Algoa Basin – its type locality – and in the neighbouring Gamtoos Basin. Outcrops of the Kirkwood are also found along the Worcester-Pletmos, Herbertsdale-Riversdale, Heidelberg-Mossel Bay, and Oudtshoorn-Gamtoos basin lines. At these basins the Kirkwood Formation underlies the Buffelskloof Formation and not the Sundays River Formation. Geology The Kirwood Formation was formed along the southern section of South Africa during the break up of Gondwana. Dating it has proven tricky, with some regarding it as a Late Jurassic (~145 Ma) or Early Cretaceous deposit (~135 Ma). However, dating the Kirkwood's abundant volcanic ash layers by U-Pb methods is currently underway. The Kirkwood Formation is composed of sedimentary rocks deposited under fluvial conditions at or near sea level, such as var ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Despatch, Eastern Cape
Despatch is a small town in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa situated between Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage with an estimated population of 40 000. It forms part of the Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality which includes Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage, and has collectively a population of over 1.3 million. History The town of Despatch is situated on rich clay soil and in the late 1800s was the site of a flourishing brick industry. Despatch's name derives from this brick industry history on the account that bricks were dispatched from the original railway siding. Many of the older buildings in Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth were built from these bricks. Most of these early bricks can be identified by the word 'Despatch' imprinted on the top and bottom of the brick. The only reminder of the town's brick industry past is a chimney built in 1882 which formed part of the Brick Works. The Chimney is situated in a field on the outskirts of the town to the north next to the rai ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Early Cretaceous
The Early Cretaceous ( geochronological name) or the Lower Cretaceous (chronostratigraphic name), is the earlier or lower of the two major divisions of the Cretaceous. It is usually considered to stretch from 145 Ma to 100.5 Ma. Geology Proposals for the exact age of the Barremian-Aptian boundary ranged from 126 to 117 Ma until recently (as of 2019), but based on drillholes in Svalbard the defining early Aptian Oceanic Anoxic Event 1a (OAE1a) was carbon isotope dated to 123.1±0.3 Ma, limiting the possible range for the boundary to c. 122–121 Ma. There is a possible link between this anoxic event and a series of Early Cretaceous large igneous provinces (LIP). The Ontong Java-Manihiki-Hikurangi large igneous province, emplaced in the South Pacific at c. 120 Ma, is by far the largest LIP in Earth's history. The Ontong Java Plateau today covers an area of 1,860,000 km2. In the Indian Ocean another LIP began to form at c. 120 Ma, the Kerguelen P ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brick
A brick is a type of block used to build walls, pavements and other elements in masonry construction. Properly, the term ''brick'' denotes a block composed of dried clay, but is now also used informally to denote other chemically cured construction blocks. Bricks can be joined using mortar, adhesives or by interlocking them. Bricks are usually produced at brickworks in numerous classes, types, materials, and sizes which vary with region and time period, and are produced in bulk quantities. ''Block'' is a similar term referring to a rectangular building unit composed of similar materials, but is usually larger than a brick. Lightweight bricks (also called lightweight blocks) are made from expanded clay aggregate. Fired bricks are one of the longest-lasting and strongest building materials, sometimes referred to as artificial stone, and have been used since circa 4000 BC. Air-dried bricks, also known as mud-bricks, have a history older than fired bricks, and have an additi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cape Town
Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest (after Johannesburg). Colloquially named the ''Mother City'', it is the largest city of the Western Cape province, and is managed by the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality. The other two capitals are Pretoria, the executive capital, located in Gauteng, where the Presidency is based, and Bloemfontein, the judicial capital in the Free State, where the Supreme Court of Appeal is located. Cape Town is ranked as a Beta world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. The city is known for its harbour, for its natural setting in the Cape Floristic Region, and for landmarks such as Table Mountain and Cape Point. Cape Town is home to 66% of the Western Cape's population. In 2014, Cape Town was named the best place ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iziko Museum
The Iziko South African Museum is a South African national museum located in Cape Town. The museum was founded in 1825, the first in the country. It has been on its present site in the Company's Garden since 1897. The museum houses important African zoology, palaeontology and archaeology collections. ''Iziko'' is a Xhosa word meaning "hearth". History The South African Museum was founded by Lord Charles Somerset in 1825 as a general museum comprising natural history and material culture from local and other groups further afield. In time, it developed greater systematic organisation and classification similar to the evolutionary models that were prominent in European and American museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus on natural history encouraged the notion that very little divided the animal world from the human subjects who were documented. This continued until the 1990s with the reservation of cultural history museums for the display of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neural Arch
The spinal column, a defining synapomorphy shared by nearly all vertebrates,Hagfish are believed to have secondarily lost their spinal column is a moderately flexible series of vertebrae (singular vertebra), each constituting a characteristic irregular bone whose complex structure is composed primarily of bone, and secondarily of hyaline cartilage. They show variation in the proportion contributed by these two tissue types; such variations correlate on one hand with the cerebral/caudal rank (i.e., location within the backbone), and on the other with phylogenetic differences among the vertebrate taxa. The basic configuration of a vertebra varies, but the bone is its ''body'', with the central part of the body constituting the ''centrum''. The upper (closer to) and lower (further from), respectively, the cranium and its central nervous system surfaces of the vertebra body support attachment to the intervertebral discs. The posterior part of a vertebra forms a vertebral arch (in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rebbachisauridae
Rebbachisauridae is a family of sauropod dinosaurs known from fragmentary fossil remains from the Cretaceous of South America, Africa, North America, Europe and possibly Central Asia. Taxonomy In 1990 sauropod specialist Jack McIntosh included the first known rebbachisaurid genus, the giant North African sauropod ''Rebbachisaurus'', in the family Diplodocidae, subfamily Dicraeosaurinae, on the basis of skeletal details. With the discovery in subsequent years of a number of additional genera, it was realised that ''Rebbachisaurus'' and its relatives constituted a distinct group of dinosaurs. In 1997 the Argentine paleontologist José Bonaparte described the family Rebbachisauridae, and in 2011 Whitlock defined two new subfamilies within the group: Nigersaurinae and Limaysaurinae. The cladogram of the Rebbachisauridae according to Carballido ''et al.'' (2012) is shown below: Cladogram after Fanti ''et al.'', 2015. Evolutionary relationships and characteristics Although al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Museum Of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain over 34 million specimens of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The museum occupies more than . AMNH has a full-time scientific staff of 225, sponsors over 120 special field expeditions each year, and averages about five million visits annually. The AMNH is a private 501(c)(3) organization. Its mission statement is: "To discover, interpret, and disseminate—through scientific research and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diplodocus
''Diplodocus'' (, , or ) was a genus of diplodocid sauropod dinosaurs, whose fossils were first discovered in 1877 by S. W. Williston. The generic name, coined by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1878, is a neo-Latin term derived from Greek διπλός (''diplos'') "double" and δοκός (''dokos'') "beam", in reference to the double-beamed chevron bones located in the underside of the tail, which were then considered unique. The genus of dinosaurs lived in what is now mid-western North America, at the end of the Jurassic period. It is one of the more common dinosaur fossils found in the middle to upper Morrison Formation, between about 154 and 152 million years ago, during the late Kimmeridgian Age. The Morrison Formation records an environment and time dominated by gigantic sauropod dinosaurs, such as ''Apatosaurus'', ''Barosaurus'', ''Brachiosaurus'', ''Brontosaurus'', and '' Camarasaurus''. Its great size may have been a deterrent to the predators ''Allosaurus'' and ''Cerato ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
