Short Wave - Move Over Norse Mythology, There's A New Loki In Town — A Dinosaur

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

A brand new species of ceratops, or horned dinosaur, was recently discovered in northern Montana. The dinosaur is called Lokiceratops rangiformis, after the Norse god Loki, and is believed to have lived roughly eighty million years ago. The bones of the plant-eating dinosaur were found on private land in an area well known for its large amount of fossils, and at first, researchers thought the bones belonged to another species of dinosaur! Want to hear more about dinosaurs or other paleontological discoveries? Email us at [e-mail] to let us know. We'd love to hear from you!See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barbara here. This time I've got some serious science dorks for our regular science news roundup, starting with Ari Shapiro, who hosts All Things and Sittered between stints with us. Hey, Ari. I'm so honored to have the title of Science Dork. It's a real privilege. And my fellow science queen producer Burley McCoy.

Hey, Gina. Okay, as you both know, we're going to share three science stories in the news that have caught our attention. recently. Yeah, everything from a newly uncovered dinosaur species to a current species balancing back from the brink of extinction and an impending star explosion that'll be visible to the naked eye. Which BT-dubs, I heard NASA scientists are calling a once-in-a-lifetime event. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, Ari, as our guest, which topic do you want to start with? I love dinosaur coverage because we got called out a few years ago by an eight-year-old listener named Leo for not doing enough dinosaur stories. So, Gina,

let's start there and continue rectifying this shortcoming. Tell us about the new dinosaur. I got you, Leo. Okay, its name is Loki Seratops Rangiformis. And it's named after the Norse god Loki for two reasons. One, because like all Saratops, it has horns on its head, but these blades, they look like the ones on Loki's helmet. And two, because its skull resides in Denmark. So that's the first part of the name. What about the second part of the name? Yeah, this is less fun, but still interesting. Like rangiformis refers to horns not being symmetrical like caribou. Huh, I didn't know caribou have asymmetrical horns.

Yeah, I had to look it up. So, Ari, this is a brand new species of seratops or horned dinosaur, and it all starts with bones found on private land in northern Montana, which is actually in my neck of the woods. So this area is well known for a place with lots of fossils. At first, researchers thought it was a known dinosaur called Medusa seretops. So it was pretty cool. We were actually gathered around a table and we're there together and we had that eureka moment where, wow, this really is something new.

That's paleontologist Mark Lowen. And this discovery was published in the journal Pier J. last week. Can I just say these names are very mythological. Like Medusa seratops, Loki seratops, I feel like we're tapping into Greek mythology in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Is this pretty typical? Well, not all of them are named that, are you? But it's a reasonable question. But they're still cool because over the years,

researchers have found five distinct seratops there, which shows how diverse the hornedino population was and how they were rapidly evolving. Mark and another co-author Joseph Surdage told me that where most dinosaur species live for around 2 million years, these fast-evolving serotops species might only have existed for 200,000 years.

So among this new family of seretops, What makes Loki seratops different from the others? Yeah, so generally seratops have horns on the top of their skulls, this bony frill going backwards from its skull, and horns on their noses. These head features are thought to be used for attracting mates, but the Loki seratops does not have this same nose horn, which Joseph says probably means... Members of his own species found that sexy to not have a nose horn and to have big blades on the back of its drill. Whatever does it for you, I guess. Yeah, no, I really like when he said that. But in all seriousness, Joseph says that really this discovery is such a big deal because it shows that we're just scratching the surface of like the dino diversity in that region during the late Cretaceous period about 78 million years ago.

Cool. So let's pivot to an animal that exists in the present day. This is a wildlife success story about a lynx that has come back from the brink of extinction. Yes, we are talking about the Iberian lynx. So these are medium-sized wild cats. They only live in Spain and Portugal, aka the Iberian Peninsula. So in 2001, there were only about 60 of these mature cats. And soon after, they were listed as critically endangered.

But through conservation efforts over the past couple of decades, the total number of links is now over 2000. This is so cool. So just last week, the lynx was officially reclassified from an endangered species to a vulnerable one. That's amazing. How did they make this comeback? So to understand that, I talked to Fernando Najara. He's a wildlife research veterinarian at the California Carnivore Program that's at UC Davis Wildlife Health Center. And he says it was a mix of things. So restoring habitat, minimizing human-caused deaths like from roadkill and poaching and releasing links that were bred in captivity back into the wild. But one huge consideration was the link's main prey, and that's the European white rabbit. So anything that happened to European wild rabbits is going to have an impact on Iranian lynxes.

The rabbits are also endangered, largely due to viral outbreaks. Two major ones in the late 80s and the early 2010s really knocked their populations down. So conservation groups trying to protect the links knew they had to focus on upping the rabbit populations. So a rebound of a couple thousand links is better than 60, but it sounds like there's still work to do, right? There is. Fernando says people working with the links now are focusing on connecting the subpopulations in different areas of the peninsula and continuing to keep an eye on the rabbit population since theoretically a viral outbreak could knock it down again. But achieving this is something that we need to celebrate. And he says he's optimistic people will see the success of bringing the links back and apply a similar approach to other species facing extinction, which is almost 30% of all assessed species.

Oh, 30% is a high number. Okay, let's go to our third and final topic of a once-in-a-lifetime star explosion. Is that once-in-a-person's lifetime or once-in-a-star's lifetime? Person's lifetime. Yeah, so astronomers expect that this summer you'll be able to see an explosion in a star system in our Milky Way galaxy with your naked eye. When that happens, it's called a Nova, and this one will be in a star system 3,000 light years away called T. Corona Borealis. And our NPR colleague Joe Hernandez reported on this recently, and the last time this happened, in this star system, and it was seen from Earth, was in 1946.

So this happens once every 80 years or so, and it's more rare than a solar eclipse. A once-in-a-lifetime event. So is this like a supernova? Is that what you're describing? Good question. It's a little different. So a nova is a rapid increase in the brightness of a star. So in this case, T. Coronae, Borealis is a binary star system, and that's made up of a

white dwarf, that's a dead star about the size of Earth, and a red giant. So the white dwarf basically sucks material from the red giant, which causes a buildup of pressure and heat on the surface of the white dwarf. And eventually there's an explosion. Yeah, and a nova is different from a supernova because in this case, the white dwarf remains intact and the cycle can repeat over time. A supernova is only the final explosion of a dying star, so the white dwarf wouldn't exist anymore if it was a supernova. You said it's happening this summer. When should we be looking at the sky to see this? Yeah.

So it could happen at any moment between now and September. And once it does happen, it'll be visible for us for a little less than a week. Astrophysicists are excited about this because we don't usually see a repeated Nova event in a human lifetime. And because this one is relatively close to our solar system. So they hope to use it to make observations that will help us understand Nova, like more in general. And the super cool thing here, Ari, is that since the star system is 3,000 light years from Earth, when we do see the explosion, it'll have already happened 3,000 years ago. Can, like, backyard astronomers with a home telescope spot this?

What's it going to look like? Yeah, they can just look up in the sky around Corona Borealis, which is a really easy to find constellation. It'll just be a star. Ari, thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Thanks, Ari. I love pretending to be a scientist with the two of you. Oh, you don't have to pretend.

Everyone is a scientist at heart. You're a scientist here. You can catch more of Ari doing his day job hosting the news on Consider This, NPR's Afternoon News Podcast. Before we head out, a quick shout out to our Shortwave Plus listeners. We appreciate you and we thank you for supporting our show. Shortwave Plus helps support our show. And if you're a regular listener, we'd love for you to join so you can enjoy the show without sponsor interruptions.

Find out more at plus.npr.npr.org slash short. This episode was produced by Gus Contreras and Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Patrick J. Erin Watananan. Burley, Rachel, Rebecca, and I check the facts. And the audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Thanks again to Alejandra Marcus Hansen. I'm Regina Barber.

And I'm Burley McCoy. Thank you for listening to Shorewave. The Science Podcast from NPR.