Dinosaurs, Disasters & Albert Einswine by Sedona Ashe

Are we living at the 'hinge of history'?.Why catastrophes can change the course of humanity.

The nuclear mistakes that nearly caused World War Three.So, what happened that led to these decisions? And what can they tell us about attitudes to the kinds of risks and crises we face today? Not just the end of their own lives, but the end of everything. There was a chance that their experiments might accidentally ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on the planet.Īt a handful of moments in the past century, a few rare groups of people have held the world's fate in their hands, responsible for the tiny-but-real possibility of causing total catastrophe. As they waited to watch the first atomic weapon test, they were aware of a potentially catastrophic outcome. The downside? There was a small possibility of unleashing deadly alien microbes on Earth.Ī couple of decades beforehand, a group of scientists and military officials stood at a similar turning point. Nasa officials decided to make things more pleasant for their three national heroes. Following the Apollo 11 Moon landings, the three astronauts were waiting to be picked up inside their capsule floating in the Pacific Ocean – and they were hot and uncomfortable. To reconstruct what the animal looked like, the team used CT scans from four separate specimens and pieced the broken fossils together to reveal its face.In the late 1960s, Nasa faced a decision that could have shaped the fate of our species. The new research, published May 2 in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology (opens in new tab), shows the animal would have had a skull similar in shape to a modern crocodile's. 'There was no chance that an animal with such a wide palate and such a narrow skull roof could have had a head like that.' 'However, when I tried to mimic that shape with the digital surface from CT scans, it just didn't work,' Porro explained. scoticus with a very tall skull, similar to that of a Moray eel. In earlier studies, Porro said, scientists reconstructed C. scoticus might have had a Jacobson's organ, which is found in animals such as snakes and helps to detect different chemicals. It may have had a so-called rostral organ that helped the creature detect electric fields, Porro said. scoticus had other senses to help it hunt. According to Porro, the gap may indicate that C. scoticus, scientists are still puzzled by a gap near the front of the animal’s snout. (Image credit: Porro et al)Īlthough much more is known about C. scoticus skull from crushed bone fragments.

Dinosaurs, Disasters & Albert Einswine by Sedona Ashe