Puertasaurus is a genus of sauropod dinosaur that lived in South America during the Late Cretaceous Period, only known from a single specimen recovered from sedimentary rocks of the Cerro Fortaleza Formation in southwestern Patagonia, Argentina. These rocks probably are Campanian to Maastrichtian in age (from 80-65 million years ago), making Puertasaurus one of the youngest giant sauropods.
The only species is Puertasaurus reuili. Described by the paleontologist Fernando Novas and colleagues in 2005, it was named in honor of Pablo Puerta and Santiago Reuil, who discovered and prepared the specimen. It consists of four well-preserved vertebrae, including one cervical, one dorsal, and two caudal vertebrae. Puertasaurus is a member of Titanosauria, the dominant group of sauropods during the Cretaceous.
Although there is no doubt that Puertasaurus was one of the largest known dinosaurs, its size is very difficult to estimate because good material is lacking. Novas estimated it to be more than 35 meters long and weigh between 80,000-100,000 kg. This would place it as significantly larger than Argentinosaurus, famous for also being very large by dinosaur standards. In 2012, Thomas Holtz estimated Puertasaurus to have been potentially 30 meters long and 72,500-80,000 kg.
In 2013, the entire neck was estimated to have been approximately 9 meters long by Mike Taylor and Matt Wedel. Later the same year, Scott Hartman made a reconstruction that suggested a shorter total length than other estimates, at 27 meters. But this reconstruction still suggested a very large animal, with his estimate possibly indicating a size up to 70,000 kg. In 2016, Gregory S. Paul estimated a length of 30 meters or more and a weight of 50,000 kg or more. In 2017, paleontologist José Carballido and his colleagues estimated its mass at roughly 60,000 kg. In 2019, Gregory S. Paul estimated the mass of Puertasaurus to be in the size range of its relative Patagotitan at 45,000-55,000 kg.
The largest of the four preserved bones is the dorsal vertebra, which at 1.68 meters (5 ft 6 in) wide is the broadest known vertebra of any sauropod, indicating a very robust torso. When Puertasaurus was alive, the Cerro Fortaleza Formation would have been a humid, forested landscape. Puertasaurus would have shared its habitat with other dinosaurs, including another large sauropod, Dreadnoughtus, in addition to other reptiles and fish.

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Euoplocephalus (meaning 'well armored head', in reference to its heavily armored skull) is a genus of very large, herbivorous or omnivorous ankylosaurian dinosaurs, living during the Late Cretaceous of Canada. It has only one named species, Euoplocephalus tutus.
The first fossil of Euoplocephalus was found in 1897 in Alberta. In 1902, it was named Stereocephalus, but that name had already been given to an insect, so it was changed in 1910. Later, many more ankylosaurid remains were found from the Campanian of North America and often made separate genera. In 1971, Walter Coombs concluded that they all belonged to Euoplocephalus which then would be one of the best-known dinosaurs. Recently however, experts have come to the opposite conclusion, limiting the authentic finds of Euoplocephalus to about a dozen specimens. Many are almost complete skeletons, so much is nevertheless known about the build of the animal. 
Some of these specimens have been estimated at 5 meters long and 2300 kg by Gregory S. Paul. Its body was low-slung and very flat and wide, standing on four sturdy legs. Its head had a short drooping snout with a horny beak to bite off plants (and probably small or dead animals as well) that were digested in the large gut. Like other ankylosaurids, Euoplocephalus was largely covered by bony armor plates, among them rows of large high-ridged oval scutes. The neck was protected by two bone rings. It could also actively defend itself against predators like Gorgosaurus using a heavy club at the end of its tail, being able to produce forces easily strong enough to shatter bone.

https://scitechdaily.com/new-biomechanical-model-shows-tyrannosaurus-rex-walked-surprisingly-slowly/

https://www.livescience.com/t-rex-slow-walker-tail.html


As the title of the topic says, a new study published on April 21, 2021 shows newer estimates on how fast a Tyrannosaurus might of was. Earlier estimates (Sellers 2017) had not taken fully into account the role of the T. rex's tail - which makes up more than half its length. Pasha Van Bijlert, is the lead author of this new study on Tyrannosaurus locomotion which is published in the Journal Royal Society Open Science. Sellers 2017 bio-mechanic study had it's issues treating the Tyrannosaurus legs as if they were graviportal, posing them in a columnar manner. However, the limbs of Tyrannosaurus were not built to be graviportal, those are the legs of a cursorial animal. The research team calculated a step rhythm from a computer model of a Tyrannosaurus tail, based on Trix, an adult 12-meter-long (39-foot-long) Tyrannosaurus fossil at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a museum of natural history and research center in the Netherlands. The scientists then multiplied the step rhythm by the step length found in fossilized tracks for an estimated baseline walking speed of 2.86 miles per hour. This is a far cry from the proposed 11-12mph brisk walking estimates from William Sellers 2017 study. Pasha Van Bijert said:
 

"Animals tend to prefer walking speeds at which, for a given distance, energy cost is minimal. They do this choosing specific step rhythms at which their body parts resonate. Since the entire tail of T. rex is suspended by ligaments, which behave like rubber bands, we reconstructed this tail to investigate at which step rhythm the tail of T. rex would resonate. The entire tail, by our reconstruction at almost 1,000 kilos, was really just a mass supported by a rubber band and with every step it would slightly bounce up and down. With the right rhythm you get a lot of movement for very little effort. Our baseline model had a preferred walking speed of 2.86 mph [4.6 km/h], which was significantly slower than earlier estimates of walking speed. Depending on some of the assumptions regarding the ligaments and how the vertebrae rotate, you get slightly slower or faster speeds (1.79 to 3.67 mph [2.88 to 5.9 km/h]), but across the board, they're all slower than earlier estimates"


This makes me question whether or not adult sized Tyrannosaurus were capable of hunting or not. I was firm to believe that prey such as Triceratops or Ankylosaurus were just as slow but with these newer estimates I'm doubting that adult sized Tyrannosaurus did hunt. Even though the risks of hunting such prey were too high, Triceratops or Ankylosaurus were not the first thing they would go for. The size of Tyrannosaurus brain is, rather unsurprisingly, quite small in proportion to its body. But it's not its total size I'm referring to. It's the proportions of the brain itself. It's no secret that the largest portion of the brain is the olfactory lobe, the part of the brain devoted to scent processing. This new study definitely ignites evidence that adult Tyrannosaurus relied on scavenging rather than hunting compared to the juvenile ones, where speed is not that big of an issue. Finding enough dead carcasses can be rather difficult, but rotting meat can carry a scent for miles in any direction. If your a scavenger, like an old world vulture shall we say, all you have to do is point, and fly, or in T. Rex's case walk, to the source of the smell. Couldn't be easier. Also as a small point, while Old World vultures use smell to find carcasses, New World vultures often rely on their eyesight. Now we know Tyrannosaurus had some really good eyesight, so perhaps young Tyrannosaurus used it to hunt, but as they got older it could've shifted to find carcasses. Just a thought. (Credit goes to vcubestudios for the information)

A new thread dedicated just to the king as they are a species different from the rest.

The king will get you anywhere even atop trees:

This is a thread about intraspecific conflict in tigers.

Hello everyone !

I would like to know if bears can control their fingers to make different moves from each other.

Are bears able to pinch, like we, the humans are able to do ?




Can they move the 4 fingers (those other than the thumb) closer or further, by using lateral abduction or median abduction ? (shown below in the left)




THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR YOUR ANSWERS ,


Florin

Megaraptor ("giant thief") is a genus of unusual theropod dinosaur that lived in the Turonian to Coniacian ages of the Late Cretaceous. Its fossils have been discovered in the rocks of the Portezuelo Formation in what is now Neuquén Province, Argentina. The holotype specimen was thought to be a giant dromaeosaurid at the time of naming in 1998 due to a very large claw interpreted as belonging to the second toe (as in dromaeosaurids). A more complete specimen described in 2004, however, showed the claw to not belong to the second toe at all but rather to the first digit of the manus, nullifying the previously proposed dromaeosaurid affinities.
The manus itself was found to be quite distinct from other known theropods at the time of its discovery, so it was not initially clear whether Megaraptor belonged to any known family of Gondwanan theropods or to a new family of theropods altogether. Early phylogenetic analyses placed Megaraptor as a basal tetanuran (both as an allosauroid and a spinosauroid), with the allosauroid theory becoming more widely accepted when other close relatives of Megaraptor (like Aerosteon and Orkoraptor) were discovered and found to form the family Megaraptora with it. 
New juvenile material of Megaraptor published in 2014 has established Megaraptor (and all other megaraptorans) were tyrannosauroids instead of allosauroids or spinosauroids, and that has been upheld very well, with almost all phylogenetic analyses since then recovering them as such. But, while bearing much morphological resemblance to the primitive tyrannosauroid family Proceratosauridae, megaraptorans were unlike the well-known tyrannosaurids in that they underwent forelimb enlargement instead of reduction and had very different ecology as a result of it.
Megaraptor itself was no exception to this. It would have had large, powerfully-built forelimbs bearing three-fingered hands, with an enlarged claw on the first digit. The humerus was long and robust with a prominent deltopectoral crest, and the ulna had a hypertrophied, blade-like olecranon process, indicating the arm muscles (like the triceps and deltoids) were very well-developed for use in prey capture. The manus was very elongated to facilitate grasping of prey items, as was the first digit's claw, with the largest claws found so far being well over 35 centimeters long and quite sharp to boot. In fact, current estimates suggest the forelimbs of Megaraptor were both longer and more robust (therefore almost certainly more powerful) relative to the animal's size than the forelimbs of carnivorous mammals like big cats or bears, strongly indicating it had a need just as great as - if not greater than - said carnivorous mammals for forelimb use in prey acquisition. 
The rest of the animal showed similarities to various other tyrannosauroids. Cranial material shows the skull was long-snouted with many small and sharp teeth (similar to the primitive tyrannosauroids Dilong and Xiongguanlong), and the preserved portions of the axial skeleton show the torso would have been deep and wide (akin to derived tyrannosaurids). The hindlimbs were very distally elongated with particularly long, gracile metatarsals, no different to the nearly universal cursorial adaptations in almost all of Tyrannosauroidea, suggesting Megaraptor was probably a good runner.
Megaraptor was a large theropod. Known adult specimens were at least 6.5 meters long, and have been estimated to weigh 1000 kg by Gregory S. Paul. Owing to its size, it may have been the apex predator of the Portezuelo, dominant over the much smaller Unenlagia and unnamed abelisaurids.

This thread will cover the populations found in the forests and basins of South America north of the Amazon basin (excluding the Llanos), most predominantly the Magdalena Medio region of Colombia, the Maracaibo Lake basin of Venezuela, the Darien intersection between Colombia and Panama, the Venezuelan tepuys etc.

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Jaguars in the Magdalena Medio Valley of Colombia
These jaguars are renowned for being buffalo killers:





By Jhon Mario

Jaguars from the Maracaibo Lake Basin, Venezuela. 
These Jaguars are tracked by the Sebraba Project, the most important jaguar conservationist organization in Venezuela:

Female



Male






Jaguar from the Darien Gap in the Pacific rainforests in northern Colombia
Bordering Panama, stretching to Ecuador and Peru.





By Juan Delgado

I find tiger Konda had been confused with another tiger,but I don't know who is the tiger.and I post some Konda picture next.