Science briefs: Washington state has first dinosaur fossil

Paleontologists at Seattle's Burke Museum said that the 80 million-year-old bone fragment probably belonged to an older, smaller cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex.

Dinosaur fossils are particularly rare along that side of the continent. Isolated skeletons and bones have been discovered at about only 10 sites near the shoreline.

Scientists think Earth's continents have shifted since dinosaurs roamed 240 million to 66 million years ago. They theorize that the area could have been underwater or otherwise uninhabitable.

Scientists haven't been able to identify what specific dinosaur the fossil comes from, since it's just a fragment. But they're certain it belonged to a theropod — a group of two-legged carnivores.

Male Java sparrows are songbirds — and, scientists said, natural percussionists.

The sparrows click their bills against a hard surface while singing. That clicking is done in coordination with the song, much as a percussion instrument accompanies a melody. Researchers at Hokkaido University in Japan observed the birds producing clicks frequently toward the beginning of their songs and around specific notes. Birds that were related produced similar percussive patterns, but whether this behavior is learned or innate is unclear.

Next the scientists, who described their findings in the journal PLOS One, would like to know whether male sparrows use bill clicks during courtship communication.

"We followed the history of these papers from the moment they were published to the moment they received maximum citations in other papers," said Alessandro Flammini, an associate professor of informatics and computing at Indiana University and one of the study's authors.

One prominent example was a paper published in 1935 by Albert Einstein and his colleagues on quantum mechanics. It was only in 1994 that this study started being widely cited by other scientists, Flammini said.

The new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that scholars should not be judged by the immediate success or failure of a publication.

The next step is to understand more about what wakens a sleeping beauty.

A giant panda may look like a vegetarian on the outside, but it definitely looks like a carnivore on the inside.

The findings, published in the journal mBio, may not bode well for the endangered species. Only about 1,600 giant pandas remain in the forests of northern and central China.

"The peculiar characteristics of its gut microbiota may put it at high risk of extinction," the study authors wrote.