A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
In 1903, scientists decided Brontosaurus was a more complete specimen of a different dinosaur.But many more specimens of plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs are now known, revealing Brontosaurus to be different enough to warrant its own name.The results have been published in the open access journal PeerJ.
The name Brontosaurus goes back to the so-called Bone Wars of the late 1800s, when rival fossil hunters Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope raced new dinosaur names into the scientific literature.In their quest for new specimens, Marsh and Cope were drawn to the rich fossil beds of the American west.
Marsh's team found two long-necked sauropods. He named one Apatosaurus ajax(Apatosaurus means "deceptive lizard") and the second skeleton Brontosaurus excelsus (Brontosaurus means "thunder lizard").Shortly after Marsh's death, a team from the Field Museum of Chicago found another dinosaur skeleton similar to both Apatosaurus ajax and Brontosaurus excelsus, but with features deemed intermediate between the two. This led the scientists to conclude that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were just different species within the same scientific genus.
Brontosaurus excelsus became Apatosaurus excelsus.But the name Brontosaurus is still known by several generations of schoolchildren. It's not entirely clear why the name stuck, but it may be to do with its origins in the Bone Wars, when there was intense public interest in the discovery of new dinosaurs.It may also be because of the evocative meaning: "thunder lizard".
Now, Emanuel Tschopp from the New University of Lisbon in Portugal and colleagues applied statistical techniques to calculate the differences between species and genera of diplodocid dinosaurs (the large-scale grouping that includes Apatosaurus as well as other long-necked plant eaters).
It is only with new finds of dinosaurs similar to Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus in recent years that it became possible to undertake a detailed investigation of how different they were."Until very recently, the claim that Brontosaurus was the same as Apatosaurus was completely reasonable, based on the knowledge we had," said Mr Tschopp.To their suprise, Brontosaurus emerged from the analysis as a distinct dinosaur.
Source : BBC News
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