According to National Geographic a controversial new theory suggests that as many of a third of currently recognized dinosaur species may never have existed at all. At least not as a true species. According to analysis by paleontologists from UC Berkley and Montana State University, many currently recognized species may in fact be misidentified juveniles of other known species. The paleontologists theorize that, like birds, the dinosaurs underwent drastic physical changes during adulthood. While other paleontologists acknowledge that some species may have been misidentified juveniles, just how many have been mistaken is the source of much controversy. Unfortunately, the amount of fossil material currently available to researchers is insufficient to adequately test this new theory.

A Third of Dinosaur Species Never Existed? [via IQXS]

The Seattle Post-Intellengencer is reporting that the FBI has a new lead in the 37 year old D.B. Cooper hijacking case that raises more questions than it answers. A south west Washington resident’s children found a parachute while playing in a rural field he had recently plowed. The FBI believes the parachute is possibly of the same type used by a passenger identifying himself as Dan Cooper during the hijacking of a 727 in 1971. After receiving $200,000 in ransom money and releasing the jet’s passengers, Cooper instructed the pilot to take off, eventually jumping from the jet’s rear stairway mid-flight, ransom in hand. The recent parachute discovery is within the area where Cooper would have landed. If found to belong to Cooper, this new parachute raises some new issues that add to the theory that Cooper was not killed during his escape as the FBI claim. In 1980 a young boy on a picnic with his family found $5,880 of the ransom money along the Columbia River. Experts agree that because of the money’s shallow depth that it could not have been placed on the shores of the Columbia River any earlier than 1974, three years after the hijacking. The lack of a body at the parachute discovery site and its distance from the spot where the ransom money was discovered makes the possibility that Cooper survived the jump quite plausible if the parachute can be linked to the ones given to him in 1971. I personally think that Cooper made the jump, escaping with the ransom and the cache of money found on the banks of the Columbia was a back-up stash placed by Cooper if he felt he needed to run from where ever he settled. While we may never know what happened to D.B., please feel free to share your own theories in the comments.

Possible D.B. Cooper Chute Investigated [via Phantoms and Monsters]
More about D.B. Cooper @ Wikipedia

Last week it looked like Spirit, one of two remote controlled NASA rovers currently exploring Mars, might not make it out of its winter hibernation. The worst part of this robotic near death experience is that it had nothing to do with technical difficulties on the aging rover. Budget cuts at NASA were to blame. Fortunately, NASA rescinded the letter it sent last week mandating budget cuts that would have abandoned Spirit and greatly reduced Opportunity’s (Spirit’s sister rover) exploration of the red planet. Both rovers have long outlasted their intended lifespan of only a few months, sending back valuable scientific data for 4 years. Gimping the rover program at this point would have been an incredibly stupid move. Especially when considering the cost of sending another rover to Mars (one of the reasons for the budget cut) when you have two healthy robots already in place whose yearly operating budget is fractional in comparison. I would hope that NASA came to this conclusion on its own, but I feel that it is more likely that outcry over the incident from the scientific community and the general public caused NASA to reconsider giving Spirit its walking papers just yet. While the loss of an incredible scientific tool is nothing to scoff about, this incident puts a light on a much larger issue: How the US government allocates it’s citizen’s tax dollars.

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