African Titanosaur Discovery Helps

Untangle Dinosaur Evolution

The creature reveals ancient connection
between Africa, Europe, and Asia after the
great Pangea broke apart
A newly discovered long-necked dino could be the missing piece to the puzzle of
African dinosaur evolution.

Found in Egypt’s Western Desert, Mansourasaurus shahinae weighed almost as

much as a bull African elephant and was as long as a bus. It tromped across
Africa during the Late Cretaceous, between 66 and 100 million years ago—a
period that is a blank spot in the records for African dinosaurs, George Dvorsky
reports for Gizmodo.

Although it may not look particularly different than other long-necked ancient
beasts you may have seen—that’s exactly what’s caught paleontologist’s
attention. During this period, many researchers believe that Africa had drifted
away from other landmasses as an isolated “island continent,” according to the
new study, published this week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. But
others think there may have still been some connections or mixing of species.
The remarkable similarity of this newly discovered African species to sauropods
found in both Europe and Asia suggests that creatures co-mingled much later
than expected, reports National Geographic’s Sarah Gibbens.

“When I first saw pics of the fossils, my jaw hit the floor,” paleontologist and
paper co-author Matt Lamanna of Carnegie Museum of Natural History says in a
press release. “This was the Holy Grail—a well-preserved dinosaur from the end
of the Age of Dinosaurs in Africa—that we paleontologists had been searching for
for a long, long time.”

The fossil is the most complete dinosaur skeleton yet discovered in Africa from
the late Cretaceous, reports the BBC’s Helen Briggs. It includes part of a skull,
lower jaw, neck and spine vertebrae, ribs, partial shoulder, forelimb, and hind
foot, and pieces of dermal plates. This completeness allowed researchers to
analyze the dinosaur’s anatomy, comparing it to other creatures that lived at the
time in Europe and Asia.

“It shows Africa wasn’t this strange lost world of dinosaurs that lived nowhere
else,” Lamanna tells Briggs. “That at least some African dinosaurs had other close
relations in other continents at the time.”
This runs counter to the last African dinosaur discovery, Sarah Sloat reports
for Inverse. When researchers found a 66-million-year-old Chenanisaurus
barbaricus, it was so distinct that they concluded African dinosaurs must have
been isolated from other regions.

Mansourasaurus was a Titanosaur, a subgroup of the long-necked plant-eating

sauropods that roamed the Cretaceous. This group includes some of the largest
dinosaur species, including Argentinosaurus, Dreadnoughtus, and Patagotitan
mayorum, writes Dvorsky. Although large, Mansourasaurus was actually
relatively small compared to its kin.

Researchers are thrilled about the find, and are hopeful they can continue to
tease out the lineage of these ancient beasts. “It’s like finding an edge piece that
you use to help figure out what the picture is, that you can build from,” says Field
Museum research scientist and study co-author Eric Gorscak in the press release.
“Maybe even a corner piece.”
 Who Invented the Yellow Card?
Penalty cards are a surprisingly recent
creation that were, perhaps unsurprisingly,
inspired by traffic lights

Among the stadiums and balls and robots specifically designed for this World
Cup, a few objects remain unchanged. Most visibly, perhaps, is the yellow card.
It is now and has, since its introduction to the World Cup in 1970, been a plain,
handheld, yellow, card. That’s it. But that simple yellow card can literally change
the game.

The use of the yellow card is strictly outlined in the FIFA rulebook, which notes
that “a player is cautioned and shown the yellow card if he commits any of the
following seven offences:”

 unsporting behavior
 dissent by word or action
 persistent infringement of the Laws of the Game
 delaying the restart of play
 failure to respect the required distance when play is restarted with a
corner kick, free kick or throw-in
 entering or re-entering the field of play without the referee’s permission
 deliberately leaving the field of play without the referee’s permission

FIFA also documents the invention of the yellow card. The card was the creation
of Ken Aston (1915-2001), one of the game’s toughest and most respected
referees, who served on the FIFA Referee’s Committee from 1966 to 1972. In
1966, Aston, a Brit, was thinking about some controversial decisions made in a
recent match between England and Argentina, which was so heated that, after
the game, an angry Argentinian team purportedly tried to break into the English
locker room. At one point, an Argentinian player was trying to communicate with
a German referee, and his passioned pleas, unintelligible to the ref, got him
expelled for “violence of the tongue.” The Argentinian player refused to leave the
field until Aston intervened. Driving home after the game, Aston pulled up to a
stoplight and inspiration struck. “As I drove down Kensington High Street, the
traffic light turned red. I thought, ‘Yellow, take it easy; red, stop, you’re off’,”
Aston had said. It’s that simple. Aston’s epiphany is now used to indicate
warnings and penalties in more than a dozen other games, including fencing,
field hockey, volleyball and water polo.
Over on Design Observer, writer Rob Walker shares some thoughts about the
yellow card as an elegant design solution.

As objects go, it doesn’t look like much. It’s, you know, a yellow card. But when
theatrically brandished by an official, almost literally in the face of a player who
has done something uncool, it has wild power. It sets off a stadium-full of
whistling, and cartoonish arm-flailing from the carded player and his colleagues.
A yellow card has real consequences: Possession, a free kick, and the possibility
that if the carded competitor blunders again he’ll leave his team understaffed
for this match, and will sit out the next....
The cards are such a brilliant solution to the problem of making sure a penalty
has been adequately signaled—they transcend language; they’re clear not just
to everyone on the field, but in the stadium, or watching on a screen—that it’s
hard to imagine the game without them.

Surprisingly, as Walker goes on to note, it’s hard to find any information on the
official standards of the yellow card. Most commercially available cards seem to
measure about 3 inches (7.62 cm) by 4 inches (10.16 cm), but 6 centimeters by
12 centimeters is often mentioned as well. And what exact color should these
cards be? Is there a pantone designation for yellow cards? A mandated hue?
What are the regulations of this regulating device? Football scholars, please
enlighten us!

Aston would probably appreciate Walker’s analysis of the yellow card as a

theatrical device. “The game should be a two-act play with 22 players on stage
and the referee as director,” Aston once said about the game he loved. “There is
no script, no plot, you don’t know the ending, but the idea is to provide
enjoyment.”