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Mecistotrachelos apeoros was a long-necked gliding reptile that lived about 220 million years ago.
(Rendering By Karen Carr -- Courtesy Of Society Of Vertebrate Paleontology)
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Poor Pluto, Dwarfed Again
Pluto just can't catch a break.
It's official: Not only is Pluto now a "dwarf planet," the category to which it was relegated last year, but scientists have determined that it is not even the largest of that new class. Eris, an object in the solar system's Kuiper Belt, is larger.
The discovery of Eris in 2005 and early estimates that it was probably larger than Pluto helped set off the controversy that resulted in Pluto's demotion from planet status. In a paper published in last week's issue of Science, California Institute of Technology astronomer Michael Brown has used precise calculations to show that Eris is 1.27 times the size of Pluto.
If Eris is not a planet, the International Astronomical Union decided last year, Pluto cannot be either. The decision prompted one of the most spirited debates about astronomy in a long time -- countless schoolchildren protested Pluto's demotion to also-ran status.
Pluto and Eris, which was formerly known as Xena, are now considered dwarf planets -- celestial bodies that have enough mass for their gravity to form them into nearly spherical shape but are small enough to be ruled, in gravitational terms, by other planets.
Brown used data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to study the orbital movement of Eris's moon, Dysnomia, which allowed him to calculate Eris's mass. Scientists expect to find many other objects of similar size in coming years, which is why they decided it is impractical to call them all planets.
-- Shankar Vedantam
Winged Victory for Va. Scientist
A scientist at the Virginia Museum of Natural History has discovered a gliding reptile that lived 220 million years ago and probably spent much of its time in trees.
Two fossils show that Mecistotrachelos apeoros had a long neck and flaps of skin between its limbs and torso that probably allowed it to soar to neighboring trees, they report in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It most likely ate insects and is probably related to the protorosaurs, a group of extinct carnivorous reptiles marked by long necks, researchers said.
The fossils were excavated from the Solite Quarry along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The area was once the site of a lake, and many animal and plant fossils have been found in shale layers there. Because the fossils cannot be separated from the rock, researchers inspected them using CT scans, an X-ray technique normally used to create images of a patient's internal organs.
