Something Very Depressing

Ceratopsian Year Continues

See Zach. Or the original paper.

haha

I am so fscking tired.

The San Bruno Blast: Before and After

Quasimodosaurus

The Cretaceous period's carnivorous answer to a camel has been unearthed in Europe after 130 million years, a new study say.

The new, hunchbacked species of dinosaur sprouted spiky, featherlike shafts on its arms; was probably a powerful runner; and likely ate small dinosaurs, crocodiles, and early mammals, researchers say.

Discovered via a finely preserved, nearly complete skeleton found in central Spain, the 20-foot-long (6-meter-long) Concavenator corcovatus—"the hunchback hunter from Cuenca"—had two raised backbones, each 1.3 feet (40 centimeters) taller than the dinosaurs' other vertebrae.

C. corcovatus's hump possibly supported a mound of fleshy tissue storing fat, as on a camel, according to the study team, led by paleontologist Francisco Ortega of the Universidad Nacional de Educacíon a Distancia in Madrid.

Alternatively, the hump might have had a display role—for example, attracting a mate or intimidating rivals—or may have helped diffuse heat and regulate body temperature, Ortega said.

I refuse to call it a camelsaur.

So, being a carcharodontosaurid spread to likely point that quills if not feathers evolved, right?

A Xenopermian Teaser

Name the critters. :D

New Plate Tectonics Simulation

Computational scientists and geophysicists at the University of Texas at Austin and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed new computer algorithms that for the first time allow for the simultaneous modeling of the earth's mantle flow, large-scale tectonic plate motions, and the behavior of individual fault zones, to produce an unprecedented view of plate tectonics and the forces that drive it.

A paper describing the whole-earth model and its underlying algorithms will be published in the August 27 issue of the journal Science and also featured on the cover.

The work "illustrates the interplay between making important advances in science and pushing the envelope of computational science," says Michael Gurnis, the John E. and Hazel S. Smits Professor of Geophysics, director of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory, and a coauthor of the Science paper.

To create the new model, computational scientists at Texas's Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES)—a team that included Omar Ghattas, the John A. and Katherine G. Jackson Chair in Computational Geosciences and professor of geological sciences and mechanical engineering, and research associates Georg Stadler and Carsten Burstedde—pushed the envelope of a computational technique known as Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR).

Partial differential equations such as those describing mantle flow are solved by subdividing the region of interest (such as the mantle) into a computational grid. Ordinarily, the resolution is kept the same throughout the grid. However, many problems feature small-scale dynamics that are found only in limited regions. "AMR methods adaptively create finer resolution only where it's needed," explains Ghattas. "This leads to huge reductions in the number of grid points, making possible simulations that were previously out of reach.”

"The complexity of managing adaptivity among thousands of processors, however, has meant that current AMR algorithms have not scaled well on modern petascale supercomputers," he adds. Petascale computers are capable of one million billion operations per second. To overcome this long-standing problem, the group developed new algorithms that, Burstedde says, "allows for adaptivity in a way that scales to the hundreds of thousands of processor cores of the largest supercomputers available today."

With the new algorithms, the scientists were able to simulate global mantle flow and how it manifests as plate tectonics and the motion of individual faults. According to Stadler, the AMR algorithms reduced the size of the simulations by a factor of 5,000, permitting them to fit on fewer than 10,000 processors and run overnight on the Ranger supercomputer at the National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported Texas Advanced Computing Center.

A key to the model was the incorporation of data on a multitude of scales. "Many natural processes display a multitude of phenomena on a wide range of scales, from small to large," Gurnis explains. For example, at the largest scale—that of the whole earth—the movement of the surface tectonic plates is a manifestation of a giant heat engine, driven by the convection of the mantle below. The boundaries between the plates, however, are composed of many hundreds to thousands of individual faults, which together constitute active fault zones. "The individual fault zones play a critical role in how the whole planet works," he says, "and if you can't simulate the fault zones, you can't simulate plate movement"—and, in turn, you can't simulate the dynamics of the whole planet.

In the new model, the researchers were able to resolve the largest fault zones, creating a mesh with a resolution of about one kilometer near the plate boundaries. Included in the simulation were seismological data as well as data pertaining to the temperature of the rocks, their density, and their viscosity—or how strong or weak the rocks are, which affects how easily they deform. That deformation is nonlinear—with simple changes producing unexpected and complex effects.

"Normally, when you hit a baseball with a bat, the properties of the bat don't change—it won't turn to Silly Putty. In the earth, the properties do change, which creates an exciting computational problem," says Gurnis. "If the system is too nonlinear, the earth becomes too mushy; if it's not nonlinear enough, plates won't move. We need to hit the 'sweet spot.'"

After crunching through the data for 100,000 hours of processing time per run, the model returned an estimate of the motion of both large tectonic plates and smaller microplates—including their speed and direction. The results were remarkably close to observed plate movements.

Paper here, I believe.

Boeing Continues Commercial Space Capsule Work

With the impending retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet, aerospace juggernaut Boeing is hard at work developing a new capsule-based spaceship that could be ready for its first commercial spaceflight by 2015.

Boeing's new Crew Space Transportation-100 spacecraft is designed to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS), as well as future private space stations.

Keith Reiley, Boeing's commercial crew development program manager, will be presenting updates on the Commercial Crew Transportation System at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautic Space 2010 Conference and Exposition next week in Anaheim, Calif.

As one of the leading suppliers of human space systems and services, Boeing already has a strong heritage in the industry. [Video: Boeing's New Spacecraft]

"It was an enormous advantage," Reiley told SPACE.com. "A lot of the equipment we're looking at has ISS heritage. About half of our team were designers that came from ISS and had experience with the flight hardware. The other half were space shuttle designers."

To help reach its goal, the company looked to existing facilities, launchers and proven processes to ensure safety, lower development costs and reduce overall risk.

Boeing's CST-100 spacecraft is approximately 15 feet (4.5 meters) wide and can carry up to seven people. The cone-shaped capsule will look similar to NASA's Apollo and Orion spacecraft.

Boeing settled on the cone-shaped design because it was thought to be the safest and most inexpensive of the vehicle concepts that were considered, Reiley said.

The spacecraft is being designed for compatibility with a variety of rockets, including United Launch Alliance's Atlas and Delta boosters and SpaceX's Falcon rockets. This will give Boeing the flexibility to select an appropriate rocket later in the development process.

The spacecraft will also be equipped with a unique pusher abort system in case the crew encounters an emergency during launch.

"This is the first time anyone has proposed or succeeded with a pusher design," Reiley said. "The pusher appears, to us, to be simpler, less expensive and just as safe."

If necessary, the launch abort system would fire pressurized propellant for three seconds to quickly push the vehicle away from the rocket. A parachute would then be deployed to assist with the landing.

One of the advantages of the pusher design is that in the event of a smooth launch, the same propellant can also be used on orbit, either in guiding the CST-100 to dock with a space station, or to boost stations themselves, whose orbits slowly decay over time.

"You get the ability to use the propellant to re-boost our customer stations or simply for orbital maneuvering to get there," Reiley said. "In order to catch up with the station you're trying to rendezvous with, you have to boost yourself up to the station's orbit, and all that takes a certain amount of fuel."

For Boeing, one of their main challenges in expanding their branch of commercial spaceflight is in designing a relatively inexpensive option.

The company has set a design requirement that the CST-100 be reusable up to 10 times. The exact number of times the capsule is reused, however, will depend upon inspection after touchdown.

No time.

30 Years of Asteroid Discovery

Introducing the Romanian Stocky Dragon

By describing a new double-clawed and highly-unusual relative of Velociraptor, paleontologists have answered a long-standing question: what did the Late Cretaceous predatory dinosaurs in Europe look like? Balaur bondoc, described this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first reasonably complete skeleton of a meat-eating dinosaur from the final 60 million years of the Age of Dinosaurs in Europe and provides insight into an ecosystem very different from that of today. Europe at the end of the Cretaceous was awash in higher seas and was an island archipelago dominated by animals smaller and more primitive than their relatives living on larger landmasses.

"We've all been waiting for something like this, and the wait has yielded an interesting surprise," says Mark Norell, chair of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the research paper describing the fossil. "B. bondoc is heavy, with unexpectedly stocky limbs and fused bones. It shows just how unusual the fauna of the area was during the waning years of the dinosaur era."

"Balaur might be one of the largest predators in this ecosystem because not even a big tooth has been found in Romania after over a hundred years of research," says co-author Zoltán Csiki of the University of Bucharest. "Fragmentary remains of Balaur were already known for more than 10 years, but the morphology is so weird we didn't have any idea where to fit them."

Balaur bondoc, which means "stocky dragon," was unearthed in Romania by geologist and co-author Mátyás Vremir of the Transylvanian Museum Society. Higher sea levels at the end of the Cretaceous flooded much of present-day continental Europe, so Romania, which was an island, is now one of the best windows into Europe at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. Other fossils discovered in these deposits include dwarf sauropods that were the size of cows and tiny duck-billed dinosaurs.

[...]

The new theropod fossil, the type specimen, is a partial skeleton that includes leg, hip, backbone, arms, hand, rib, and tail bones. But B. bondoc has 20 unique features when compared to its nearest relatives, including a re-evolved functional big toe with a large claw that can be hyperextended, presumably used to slash prey. Because there is also a large claw on the second toe, as is typical of the group of dinosaurs to which B. bondoc belongs, the new species has unusual double-clawed feet. Unique features are also found in other parts of the foot, leg, and pelvis. The feet and legs are short and stocky, with bones fused together, and the pelvis has enormous muscle attachment areas, indicating that this species was adapted for strength over speed. Finally, the hand is atrophied and some of the bones are fused, features that would have made grasping difficult. This, in combination with the leg and foot traits, indicates that the lower limbs rather than hands were used to grasp and disembowel prey.

"Balaur is a new breed of predatory dinosaur, very different from anything we have ever known," says Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University who is affiliated with the Museum. "Its anatomy shows that it probably hunted in a different way than its less stocky relatives. Compared to Velociraptor, Balaur was probably more of a kickboxer than a sprinter, and it might have been able to take down larger animals than itself, as many carnivores do today."

"Nevertheless, Balaur is the size of an oversized turkey and unlike what we know of the large predators from other parts of the world at the same time period, like Tyrannosaurus or Carnotaurus," says Csiki. "As European dinosaur faunas were known to be peculiar, we half-expected to find peculiar predators as well. But, as the first good record of these, Balaur surely exceeds our most daring expectations."

no time and then some.

Done by a Friend...and only virtual currently. Alas.

Scott is quite good.

Terror Bird Bites (and their biomechanics)

The ancient "terror bird" Andalgalornis couldn't fly, but it used its unusually large, rigid skull--coupled with a hawk-like hooked beak--in a fighting strategy reminiscent of boxer Muhammad Ali.

The agile creature repeatedly attacked and retreated, landing well-targeted, hatchet-like jabs to take down its prey, according to results of a new study published this week in the journal PLoS ONE.

The study is the first detailed look at the predatory style of a member of an extinct group of large, flightless birds known scientifically as Phorusrhacids but popularly labeled "terror birds" because of their fearsome skull and often imposing size.

Terror birds evolved about 60 million years ago in isolation in South America, an island continent until the last few million years, radiating into about 18 known species ranging in size up to the 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) Kelenken.

Because terror birds have no close analogs among modern-day birds, their life habits have been shrouded in mystery, according to William Zamer, acting deputy director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Integrative Organismal Systems, which funded the research.

Now, a multinational team of scientists has performed the most sophisticated study to date of the form, function and predatory behavior of a terror bird, using CT scanning and advanced engineering methods.

"No one has ever attempted such a comprehensive biomechanical analysis of a terror bird," said study lead author Federico Degrange of the Museo de La Plata/CONICET in Argentina.

"We need to figure out the ecological role these amazing birds played if we really want to understand how the unusual ecosystems of South America evolved over the past 60 million years."

The terror bird under study is called Andalgalornis and lived in northwestern Argentina about six million years ago. It was a mid-sized terror bird, standing about 4.5 feet tall (1.4 meters) and weighing in at a fleet-footed 90 pounds (40 kg).

Like all terror birds, its skull was relatively enormous (14.5 inches or 37 centimeters) with a deep narrow bill armed with a powerful, hawk-like hook.

Paper co-author Lawrence Witmer of the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine ran a complete skull of Andalgalornis through a CT scanner, giving the team a glimpse into the skull's inner architecture.

The scans revealed to Witmer, Degrange and article co-author Claudia Tambussi, also from the Museo de La Plata/CONICET, that Andalgalornis was unlike other birds because it had evolved a highly rigid skull.

"Birds generally have skulls with lots of mobility between the bones, which allows them to have light but strong skulls," said Witmer.

"But we found that Andalgalornis had turned these mobile joints into rigid beams. This guy had a strong skull, particularly in the fore-aft direction, despite having a curiously hollow beak."

The evolution of this large and rigid bony weapon was presumably linked to the loss of flight in terror birds, as well as to their sometimes gigantic sizes.

From the CT scans, Stephen Wroe, director of the Computational Biomechanics Research Group at the University of New South Wales, Australia, assembled sophisticated 3-D models of the terror bird and two living species for comparison (an eagle, and the terror bird's closest living relative, the seriema).

Using computers and software supplied by Wroe, Degrange and Karen Moreno of the Université Paul Sabatier in Toulouse, France, applied an approach known as Finite Element Analysis to simulate and compare the biomechanics of biting straight down (as in a killing bite), pulling back with its neck (as in dismembering prey) and shaking the skull from side to side (as in thrashing smaller animals, or when dealing with larger struggling prey).

Color images created by the program show cool-blue areas where stresses are low and white-hot areas where stresses get dangerously high.

The simulations supported the CT-based anatomical results.

"Relative to the other birds considered in the study, the terror bird was well-adapted to drive the beak in and pull back with that wickedly recurved tip of the beak," remarked Wroe, "but when shaking its head from side to side, its skull lights up like a Christmas tree."

A key part of the analysis was determining how hard a bite Andalgalornis could deliver.

To examine bite force in birds in general, Degrange and Tambussi worked with zookeepers at the La Plata Zoo to get a seriema and an eagle to chomp down on their bite meter.

"We discovered that the bite force of Andalgalornis was a little lower than we expected, and weaker than the bite of many carnivorous mammals of about the same size," Degrange said.

"Andalgalornis may have compensated for this weaker bite by using its powerful neck muscles to drive its strong skull into prey like an axe."

The team's results give new insight into the lifestyle of a unique avian predator.

Its skull, though strong vertically, was weak from side to side; its hollow beak was in danger of catastrophic fracture if Andalgalornis grappled too vigorously with large struggling prey.

Instead, the study shows that the terror bird engaged in an elegant style more like that of Muhammad Ali--a repeated attack-and-retreat strategy with well-targeted, hatchet-like jabs.

Once killed, the prey would have been ripped into bite-sized morsels by the powerful neck pulling the head straight back or, if possible, swallowed whole.

Freakin parrot from hell!

Also covered here, here, and here.

Sauron? That you? Did the Hobbits Not Get You?!

India and Russia to Collaborate on Moon Probe?

A modern-day space race to land an unmanned probe on the Moon is emerging between Russia and India on one side and China on the other.

After months of negotiations, Russian and Indian engineers have started working on a robotic mission together.

This would see the landing of a small four-wheeled rover on to the surface of the Earth's celestial neighbour.

It is set to launch in 2013, to roughly match the scheduled lunar landing of China's Chang'e-3 spacecraft.

Whichever team gets there first, it would be the first human hardware to function on the lunar surface since the Soviet Luna-24 spacecraft returned to Earth with Moon's soil samples in 1976.

Known in Russia as Luna-Resource and in India as Chandrayaan-2, the joint mission will include an Indian-built lunar orbiter and the Russian-built landing platform both launched by a single Indian rocket.

The Russian-built four-legged platform will deliver around 35kg of scientific equipment to the lunar surface and release a 15kg Indian-built robotic rover.

Despite being a far cry from the 750kg Soviet Lunokhod rovers, which rolled across the lunar landscape in the 1970s, the tiny Indian electric vehicle is still expected to provide scientific data, thanks to miniaturisation of technology.

"We do understand that, first of all, it is a demonstration of the Indian presence on the surface of the Moon," Aleksandr Zakharov, a leading scientist at the Space Research Institute (IKI) in Moscow told BBC News.

"However, it will have a TV camera onboard, and we also asked our Indian partners to include a miniature manipulator, so it could sample soil beyond the reach of the robotic arm of the (stationary Russian) lander."

The rover and all of its scientific instruments are expected to be Indian-built, even though India is free to solicit foreign participation, Mr Zakharov said.

And the X Prize teams on another...in a way...maybe. lol. How funny.

Ediacarian Sponge Fossils Found

Fossils of what could be the oldest animal bodies have been discovered in Australia, pushing back the clock on when animal life first appeared on Earth to at least 70 million years earlier than previously thought.

The results suggest that primitive sponge-like creatures lived in ocean reefs about 650 million years ago. Digital images of the fossils suggest the animals were about a centimeter in size (the width of your small fingertip) and had irregularly shaped bodies with a network of internal canals.

The shelly fossils, found beneath a 635 million-year-old glacial deposit in South Australia, represent the earliest evidence of animal body forms in the current fossil record. Previously, the oldest known fossils of hard-bodied animals were from two reef-dwelling organisms that lived around 550 million years ago.

Researchers have identified controversial fossils of soft-bodied animals that date to the latter part of the Ediacaran period between 577 and 542 million years ago.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences.

Really no time. Rockets, kids, daycare, Avrora in kindergarten, lyuda's school. Feel lucky I have time to even post at all.

wild ride

More updates soon.

Was the Early Earth Chondritic or Not?

Researchers have found a primitive Earth mantle reservoir on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Geologist Matthew Jackson and his colleagues from a multi-institution collaboration report the finding--the first discovery of what may be a primitive Earth mantle--this week in the journal Nature.

The Earth's mantle is a rocky, solid shell that is between the Earth's crust and the outer core, and makes up about 84 percent of the Earth's volume. The mantle is made up of many distinct portions or reservoirs that have different chemical compositions.

Scientists had previously concluded that the Earth was slightly older than 4.5 billion years old, but had not found a piece of the Earth's primitive mantle.

Until recently, researchers generally thought that the Earth and the other planets of the solar system were chondritic, meaning that the mantle's chemistry was thought to be similar to that of chondrites--some of the oldest, most primitive objects in the solar system. Assuming a chondritic model of the Earth, a piece of the primitive mantle would have certain isotope ratios of the chemical elements of helium, lead and neodymium.

The model that the Earth was chondritic was called into question with a discovery five years ago by a team at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, which suggested the ratio of neodymium on Earth was higher than what would be expected if the Earth were indeed chondritic.

That finding changed the neodymium ratio expected in the primitive mantle and in turn, changed where researchers should be looking to find evidence of a primitive mantle. According to the lead author, Matthew Jackson, "We had been looking under the wrong rock."

Since many of the ancient rocks have melted over time, finding a piece of the primitive mantle means studying lavas. Lavas retain the same isotopic composition of the rocks that have melted into the lava. Therefore, testing the lava's composition is identical to testing the original rock's composition.

When the assumption about the neodymium ratio was altered, Jackson and his colleagues knew they should take a look at lava samples from Baffin Island, since those samples contained the correct ratios of helium and neodymium. They discovered that the lavas also had the correct ratio for lead. The lead isotopes suggest that the samples from Baffin Island date the lava's mantle source reservoir to between 4.55 and 4.45 billion years old, only a little younger than the age of the Earth. The lava sample comes from an ancient rock that melted 62 million years ago.

When the researchers studied the composition of the lava found at Baffin Island, they discovered that the sample had the correct ratios of all three chemical elements--helium, lead, and the new non-chronditic neodymium ratio. This discovery suggests that the sample from Baffin Island is the first evidence for the oldest mantle reservoir.

This study challenges the idea that the Earth has a chondritic primitive mantle and according to Matthew Jackson is, "suggesting an alternative." One possibility, according to Jackson, is that "the early Earth went through a differentiation event and the Earth's crust was extracted from the early mantle and is now hidden in the deep earth; the hidden crust and the mantle found on Baffin Island would sum to chondritic."

Big potential wrinkle there.

Lucy the Tool User?

The evolutionary stories of the Swiss Army Knife and the Big Mac just got a lot longer. An international team of scientists led by Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged from the California Academy of Sciences has discovered evidence that human ancestors were using stone tools and consuming meat from large mammals nearly a million years earlier than previously documented. While working in the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Alemseged's "Dikika Research Project" team found fossilized bones bearing unambiguous evidence of stone tool use—cut marks inflicted while carving meat off the bone and percussion marks created while breaking the bones open to extract marrow. The bones date to roughly 3.4 million years ago and provide the first evidence that Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, used stone tools and consumed meat. The research is reported in the August 12 issue of the journal Nature.

[...]

Although the butchered bones may not look like particularly noteworthy fossils to the lay person, Alemseged can hardly contain his excitement when he describes them. "This find will definitely force us to revise our text books on human evolution, since it pushes the evidence for tool use and meat eating in our family back by nearly a million years," he explains. "These developments had a huge impact on the story of humanity."

Until now, the oldest known evidence of butchering with stone tools came from Bouri, Ethiopia, where several cut-marked bones were dated to about 2.5 million years ago. The oldest known stone tools, dated to around the same time, were found at nearby Gona, Ethiopia. Although no hominin fossils were found in direct association with the Gona tools or the Bouri bones, an upper jaw from an early Homo species dated to about 2.4 million years ago was found at nearby Hadar, and most paleoanthropologists believe the tools were made and used only by members of the genus Homo.

The new stone-tool-marked fossil animal bones from Dikika have been dated to approximately 3.4 million years ago and were found just 200 meters away from the site where Alemseged's team discovered "Selam" in 2000. Dubbed "Lucy's Daughter" by the international press, Selam was a young Australopithecus afarensis girl who lived about 3.3 million years ago and represents the most complete skeleton of a human ancestor discovered to date.

awesome. no time again.

Russia Is Burning

Rumor has it that aAt least 1/5th 1/4 of the grain harvest has been wiped out. I'm unclear whether this is from the heat or the fire itself.

Gondwana Shifted HOW MUCH During the Cambrian?!

The Gondwana supercontinent underwent a 60-degree rotation across Earth's surface during the Early Cambrian period, according to new evidence uncovered by a team of Yale University geologists. Gondwana made up the southern half of Pangaea, the giant supercontinent that constituted the Earth's landmass before it broke up into the separate continents we see today. The study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Geology, has implications for the environmental conditions that existed at a crucial period in Earth's evolutionary history called the Cambrian explosion, when most of the major groups of complex animals rapidly appeared.

The team studied the paleomagnetic record of the Amadeus Basin in central Australia, which was part of the Gondwana precursor supercontinent. Based on the directions of the ancient rock's magnetization, they discovered that the entire Gondwana landmass underwent a rapid 60-degree rotational shift, with some regions attaining a speed of at least 16 (+12/-8) cm/year, about 525 million years ago. By comparison, the fastest shifts we see today are at speeds of about four cm/year.

This was the first large-scale rotation that Gondwana underwent after forming, said Ross Mitchell, a Yale graduate student and author of the study. The shift could either be the result of plate tectonics (the individual motion of continental plates with respect to one another) or "true polar wander," in which the Earth's solid land mass (down to the liquid outer core almost 3,000 km deep) rotates together with respect to the planet's rotational axis, changing the location of the geographic poles, Mitchell said.

The debate about the role of true polar wander versus plate tectonics in defining the motions of Earth's continents has been going on in the scientific community for decades, as more and more evidence is gathered, Mitchell said.

In this case, Mitchell and his team suggest that the rates of Gondwana's motion exceed those of "normal" plate tectonics as derived from the record of the past few hundred million years. "If true polar wander caused the shift, that makes sense. If the shift was due to plate tectonics, we'd have to come up with some pretty novel explanations."

Whatever the cause, the massive shift had some major consequences. As a result of the rotation, the area that is now Brazil would have rapidly moved from close to the southern pole toward the tropics. Such large movements of landmass would have affected environmental factors such as carbon concentrations and ocean levels, Mitchell said.

"There were dramatic environmental changes taking place during the Early Cambrian, right at the same time as Gondwana was undergoing this massive shift," he said. "Apart from our understanding of plate tectonics and true polar wander, this could have had huge implications for the Cambrian explosion of animal life at that time."

uh. Yeah. To say the least. If it did this, I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a lot of volcanism. 60 degrees though?!