Nobel laureate visits Bose Institute museum
KOLKATA: Nobel laureate chemist Prof Ada
E Yonath on Friday said she was privileged to see the instruments that were used by Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose at the Bose Institute museum.
Yonath, who was here to deliver the 79th Acharya J C
Bose Memorial Lecture, visited the museum of the Institute founded by J C Bose in 1917.
“Thanks for showing me the very interesting museum,” Yonath wrote in the visitors’ book after taking a look round various galleries at the century-old building.
A spokesman of the museum said Yonath was shown some instruments such as photosynthetic bubbler, automatic recorder of root growth, Bose’s self-designed apparatus to study responses in living and non-living, oscillating plate phytograph, response recorder, the compound lever crescograph and microwave apparatus.
“I am privileged to be here,” said Yonath, who had received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A Steitz in 2009. WASHINGTON : A dazzling discovery in northwestern China of hundreds of fossilized pterosaur eggs is providing fresh understanding of these flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs including evidence that their babies were born flightless and needed parental care.
Scientists said on Thursday they unearthed 215 eggs of the fish-eating Hamipterus tianshanensis — a species whose adults had a crest atop an elongated skull, pointy teeth and a wingspan of more than 11 feet (3.5 meters) — including 16 eggs containing partial embryonic remains.
Fossils of hundreds of male and female adult Hamipterus individuals were found alongside juveniles and eggs at the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region site, making this Cretaceous Period species that lived 120 million years ago perhaps the best understood of all pterosaurs.
“We w a n t t o c a l l t h i s r e g i o n ‘Pterosaur Eden,’” said paleontologist Shunxing Jiang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute o f Ve r t e b r a t e P a l e o n t o l o g y a n d Paleoanthropology.
Pterosaurs were Earth’s first flying vertebrates. Birds and bats appeared later.
Until now, no pterosaur eggs had been found with embryos preserved in three dimensions. Researchers think up to 300 eggs may be present, some buried under the exposed fossils.
The embryonic bones indicated the hind legs of a baby Hamipterus developed more rapidly than crucial wing elements like the humerus bone, said paleontologist Alexander Kellner of Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.
“Some birds can fly on the same day they break out from the egg, while some others will need a long period of parental care. Our conclusion is that a baby Hamipterus can walk but can’t fly,” Jiang said, an unexpected finding.
The researchers believe these pterosaurs lived in a bustling colony near a large freshwater lake. Kellner cited evidence that females gathered together to lay eggs in nesting colonies and returned over the years to the same nesting site.
They suspect the eggs and some juvenile and adult individuals were washed away from a nesting site in a storm and into the lake, where they were preserved and later fossilised.