Chinese Paleontologists Create Full Rendering of Dinosaur Walking on Two Feet

An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)
An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)
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Chinese Paleontologists Create Full Rendering of Dinosaur Walking on Two Feet

An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)
An artist’s rendering of Auroraceratops. (Robert Walters)

Paleontologists have created a full rendering of a dinosaur walking on two feet.

The involved paleontologists managed to complete their rendering based on a series of articles appearing as Memoir in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology on July 8.

The Auroraceratops was one of many dinosaur species known from scant remains. It was named in 2005 based upon a single skull from the Gobi Desert in northwestern China.

But, in the intervening years, scientists have recovered fossils from more than 80 individual Auroraceratops, bringing this small-bodied plant-eater into one of the few very early horned dinosaurs known from complete skeletons.

In the new Memoir, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Gansu Agricultural University, described the anatomy and evolution of Auroraceratops.

Their analysis places Auroraceratops, which lived roughly 115 million years ago, as an early member of the group Ceratopsia, or horned dinosaurs, the same group to which Triceratops belongs.

In contrast to Triceratops, Auroraceratops is small, approximately 49 inches (1.25 meters) in length and 17 inches (44 cm) tall, weighing on average 34 pounds (15.5 kilograms).

While Auroraceratops has a short frill and beak that characterize it as a horned dinosaur, it lacks the "true" horns and extensive cranial ornamentation of Triceratops.

The paleontologists also provided a more detailed description, saying the Auroraceratops preserves multiple features of the skeleton, like a curved femur and long, thin claws that are unambiguously associated with walking bipedally.

Eric Morschhauser, head of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, said: "This rendering can now provide us with a better picture of the starting point for the changes between bipedal and quadrupedal dinosaurs."

"Before this rendering, we had to rely on Psittacosaurus for our picture of what the last bipedal dinosaur looked like,” he added.



Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
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Dreams and Nightmares Exhibit at World’s Oldest Psychiatric Hospital

Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)
Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions is at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in Beckenham, London, from 14 August (Bethlem Museum of the Mind)

A new exhibition featuring artwork and poems from contemporary artists and former patients will go on show at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem, in London, the Guardian newspaper said on Monday.

The vivid dream that vanishes on waking but fragments of which remain tantalizingly out of reach all day. Powerful emotions – tears, terror, ecstasy, despair – caused not by real events, but by the brain’s activity between sleeping and waking.

“Dreams and nightmares have long been studied by psychologists,” the newspaper wrote.

Now they are the subject of a new exhibition featuring several artists that were patients at the world’s oldest psychiatric hospital, Bethlem (sometimes known as Bedlam), and its sister institution, the Maudsley hospital.

The exhibit includes paintings by Charlotte Johnson Wahl, the late mother of Boris Johnson, who spent eight months as a patient at the Maudsley after a breakdown when her four children were aged between two and nine.

She created dozens of paintings while there, and held her first exhibition which sold out. “I couldn’t talk about my problems, but I could paint them,” she said later.

Two of Johnson Wahl’s paintings are included in the exhibition, Between Sleeping and Waking: Hospital Dreams and Visions, which opens at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind in August.

The centerpiece of the show is a huge installation, Night Tides, by contemporary artist Kate McDonnell. She uses swathes of bedding woven with disordered words to evoke the restlessness and clashing thoughts of insomnia.

According to Caroline Horton, professor of sleep and cognition and director of DrEAMSLab at Bishop Grosseteste university in Lincoln, “dreaming occurs during sleep, and sleep is essential for all aspects of mental and physical health.

Among other works featured in the exhibition is London’s Overthrow by Jonathan Martin, an arsonist held in the “criminal lunatic department” of Bethlem hospital from 1829 until his death in 1838. In 2012, the Guardian described it as a “mad pen-and-ink depiction of the capital’s destruction due to godlessness”.