Egyptian Dinosaurs, Leaking Data, Huntington’s Research, Mole Rats. Feb 2, 2018, Part 2

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🗓️ 2 February 2018

⏱️ 47 minutes

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Summary

Dinosaurs existed all over the world—fossils have been found on every continent. Africa is no exception, but far fewer fossils have been found there from the late Cretaceous era—the period before the dinosaurs went extinct. But a new discovery in Egypt could provide clues about the evolution of dinosaurs in Africa. Click here to learn more. Last weekend, an Australian researcher pointed out on Twitter that a “heat map” of popular running locations released by the fitness app Strava could be used to help identify the locations of military installations in deserted areas. Is big data revealing more than you know—or want other people to know? New research shows that decades before outward signs of the neurological illness show, Huntington’s disease will affect the development of an embryo. What the naked mole rat lacks in conventual cuteness it makes up for with some superpower-like qualities—including an aversion to cancer and the ability to defy the laws of aging. Ira digs into the data to find out what else we could learn from these, well, interesting-looking creatures.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. A little later in the hour, a look at what data your
0:05.8	apps might be sharing without you even knowing about it. But first, at one time dinosaurs ruled
0:13.7	the planet. You know that. They existed on every corner of the world. Fossils of the animals
0:18.3	have been found on every continent, and Africa is no exception.
0:23.1	But the history of dinosaurs in Africa is a little bit hazy. It's incomplete. And now a new discovery
0:29.3	might help clear that up. A titanosaur, a giant sauropod, has been uncovered in Egypt that dates back to the final dinosaur era about 60 to 100 million years ago.
0:42.3	A rare find for that part of the world.
0:45.2	The discovery was published this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
0:50.5	And my next guest is here to tell us what this missing puzzle piece tells us about dinosaurs in Africa.
0:56.3	Eric Gorsak is author on that study.
0:58.8	He's also a postdoc researcher at the Field Museum, famous Field Museum in Chicago.
1:04.3	Welcome.
1:05.3	Hello, thanks for having me.
1:06.6	So this dino is from a group called Titanosaur.
1:10.0	I heard that he had sort of a bit of a Jay Leno chin.
1:13.7	Yeah.
1:14.9	The new dinosaur Monsorosaurus belongs to the group Titanosaurs,
1:18.2	and they're very successful clade of dinosaurs during the last act of the age of dinosaurs during a Cretaceous period.
1:24.3	And one of its defining features is its chin.
1:26.9	It's a very well-developed chin compared to other
1:29.4	titanosaurs. So what does this tell us about this dinosaur? What's the significant about this
1:34.1	finding? Yeah. So the last 20 million years or so of the Cretaceous, that last act of the age
	...

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