Science News
Headlines
. A dinosaur fossil so large, it broke the road during transport!
. Gigantic iceberg breaks free in Antarctica, revealing fish nest beneath
. Two tiny genetic shifts helped early humans walk upright
. Spider web 'decorations' may help pinpoint location of captured prey
For more details on some of these articles, read on.
. A dinosaur fossil so large, it broke the road during transport!
Scientists in Argentina have described a new long-necked dinosaur, Chucarosaurus diripienda, that stretched about 100 feet. It lived around 90 million years ago in Patagonia, at the southern end of South America (parts of Argentina and Chile).
The find adds a big piece to the puzzle of South America’s giant plant- eaters. It is not the largest ever found, but it is large enough to sharpen how researchers think about sauropod body design. Lead researcher Fernando E. Novas, of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires and CONICET, said that the partial skeleton, about 166 million years old, came from Río Negro province and includes hip and limb elements. The dinosaur's thigh bone, called femur, is nearly 2 meters long! The limb bones are unusually slender. These appendicular bones, limb bones from shoulders to toes, vary more than expected and carry signals useful for classifying relatives.
“The weight destabilized the vehicle and caused an accident,” said Novas. No one was seriously hurt, and the bones survived the impact thanks to their density. The asphalt did not fare as well under the weight of the fossil blocks, which says something about the scale of these fossils.
Field crews protected the blocks with plaster jackets, then hauled them from the steppe to the capital for study. That journey, inch by inch, is a standard part of turning hard rock into data. In the lab, careful preparation exposed the muscle scars and joint surfaces that carry the evolutionary signals. From there, anatomical measurements fed the tree-building analysis and the final diagnosis of a new genus and species.
The Chucarosaurus diripienda belongs to the titanosaur, plant-eating dinosaur group. It would have a long-neck and browsed high vegetation. Its long tail likely served as a deterrent against large predators patrolling the same habitats.
The femur, tibia, and ischium reveal a mix of strength and lightness. Slender shafts paired with big muscle scars suggest sturdy support without unnecessary bulk. The fossils came from the Huincul Formation in the Neuquén Basin. This Late Cretaceous rock unit in northern Patagonia has yielded a rich mix of dinosaurs and croc-line reptiles. Río Negro has not produced many giants of this scale. Filling that geographic gap helps test ideas about how climate and plants shaped sauropod diversity across Patagonia. 
Mass is not measured directly, so researchers rely on mass estimation, techniques that convert bone measurements into weight. Different methods, from limb scaling to 3D models, can yield different numbers and confidence ranges. One influential analysis estimated its weight at roughly 69 tons. So the animal sits near the upper limit for land-dwelling vertebrates.

. Gigantic iceberg breaks free in Antarctica, revealing fish nest beneath
Researchers in Antarctica have discovered a strange collection of icefish nests. The scientists were on expedition in the Weddell Sea looking for Sir Ernest Shackleton's lost ship, the Endurance (which sank in 1915 and was discovered in 2022) when they found the nesting grounds in a remote area which had, until recently, been underneath a large ice shelf. 
When the 5,800-square-kilometre A68 iceberg calved from the Larsen C Ice Shelf, scientists were finally able to access the seabed beneath. It wasn’t easy. “As with a lot of Antarctic research we battled the cold, sieving freezing cold mud on the back deck for hours,” says Dr Michelle Taylor, head of science at Ocean Census. But the challenge was worth it as they found something spectacular. Using an underwater robot called 'Lassie’ to explore the seafloor, they discovered more than 1,000 dimples arranged in neat patterns in the sand.
At first, they didn’t know what they were looking at. But they were so clear, and clean, in obvious contrast to the surrounding carpet of green phytoplankton. Putting together the clues – the size, shape, and the fact that there were fish nearby – they realised that these were the nests of icefish called the yellowfin notie. 
Icefish are remarkable for surviving in freezing water temperatures in Antarctica. This white-blooded fish (or icefish) has icy white blood, a phenomenon that puzzled scientists for decades. It lacks the red blood cells essential for oxygen transport in humans. Instead, it carries blood proteins that act like antifreeze and prevent ice crystal formation in its organs. That's how it survives not just the cold of the Antarctic, but it can also live out of water for more than two months!
Most of the 1,036 nests were inactive but 72 of them had larvae in the nest or nearby. The fish fish live deep on the dark, cold Antarctic seabed and build small, circular nests in the fine sediment, and then the males guard the eggs for around four months. Their main threat comes from predators on the seafloor, like brittle stars and predatory worms, which try to eat the eggs.
The geometric patterns might be a way the fish protect themselves from predators. By arranging their nests in these tight groups, the fish in the centre are protected by the neighbours surrounding them. Larger, stronger fish usually live in the outer nests as these are more likely to be able to defend themselves from predators.
These large nesting areas are also important for the ecosystem around them. “These fish are habitat builders, creating vast nesting aggregations which will support the wider biodiversity of the Antarctic,” says Connelly. The team from the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 say the discovery of this unique habitat shows how important it is for the area to be designated as a Marine Protected Area. 

. Two tiny genetic shifts helped early humans walk upright
Two small genetic changes reshaped the human pelvis, setting our early ancestors on the path to upright walking, scientists say. One genetic change flipped the ilium — the bone your hands rest on when you put them on your hips — by 90 degrees. The rotation reoriented the muscles that attach to the pelvis, turning a system that was used for climbing and running on all four legs into one for standing and walking on two legs. The other change delayed how long it takes for the ilium to harden from soft cartilage into bone, evolutionary biologist Gayani Senevirathne of Harvard University and colleagues report in the Journal Nature. The result: a distinctive bowl-shaped pelvis that supports an upright body.
While non-human primates can walk upright to some extent, they typically move on all fours. The newly identified changes to human pelvic development were “essential for creating and shifting muscles that are usually on the back of the animal, pushing the animal forward, to now being on the sides, helping us stay upright as we walk.
The researchers examined tiny slices of developing pelvic tissue from humans, chimpanzees and mice under a microscope, and paired those findings with CT imaging. Human ilium cartilage grows sideways, not vertically as it does in other primates, the team found. What’s more, the cartilage transitions to bone more slowly than in nonhuman primates and in other human body parts. Together, these shifts allow the pelvis to expand sideways and maintain its wide, bowl-like shape as it grows. 
A genetic analysis linked the shifts to biological on-off switches that control gene activity. In humans, cartilage-forming genes turned on in regions of the growing ilium that prompted the bone to grow horizontally. Bone-forming genes turned on later and in different spots, delaying the hardening process and letting the cartilage expand sideways. The extra growing time helps shape the short, wide pelvis that gives humans stability on two legs.
Because developmental genes are largely the same across primates, the team infers that the gene-rewiring activity happened after humans diverged from chimpanzees during the process of evolution. One of the most significant things about this change is it shows how critical it was to establish the ability to stand on one foot at a time, which lets us walk on two feet.
The team’s research didn’t begin as an evolution story. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, the scientists were studying how the pelvis and knees form to better understand hip disorders. It was geared towards biomedical research, understanding how you build a pelvis and why it’s different from other primates, and more importantly, why it leads to disease. Ironically, the changes that made walking possible might also have made our hips more vulnerable to osteoarthritis, which is far more common in humans than in other primates.

. Spider web 'decorations' may help pinpoint location of captured prey
For a long time, scientists have wondered why spider webs sometimes feature "extra touches" known as stabilimenta. Many spider species build spiral wheel-shaped webs (orb webs) to capture flying prey, and many can incorporate stabilimenta into the web structure. These "decorations" may look like zigzagging threads spanning the gap between two adjacent "spokes," or threads arranged in a circular "platform" around the web center. The purpose of stabilimenta was unclear. Various suggestions proposed include water collection, body temperature regulation, and balancing insect attraction with deterrence of predatory wasps or birds.
Another novel possibility has recently been explored: that when a prey "hits" the web, the impact causes the web to vibrate. These stabilimenta may aid spiders by influencing the way these vibrations propagate. Gabrielo Greco and colleagues from Sweden observed different stabilimentum geometries constructed by wasp spiders, Argiope bruennichi. Based on these structures, the researchers then ran numerical simulations to explore how stabilimenta affect prey impact vibrations.
They found that spider web "decorations" may help pinpoint the location of captured prey so that the spider could easily move to that location. While these findings deepen understanding of stabilimenta, this study could inluence the design of web-inspired synthetic materials. By combining field observations and simulations, the work inspires designs for bio-inspired materials with tunable elastic properties.
Sources: Earth.com, BBC discoverwildlife.com, sciencenews.org, phys.org