Entertainment: Irving Azoff: Fleetwood Mac to Tour in 2011

Irving Azoff and Michael Rapino, executive chairman and CEO (respectively) of Live Nation Entertainment recently said during an investors meeting that the ticket sales for the top 100 touring bands are down twelve percent this year. 

Rapino claims that the press has "scared about every artist" from touring in the fourth quarter of 2010.  Major acts have either cancelled dates, seen low takes on the ticket front or cancelled tours altogether.  Still, that hasn't stopped Azoff from listing several "big name" artists that will be touring in 2011.

Journey, Kenny Chesney, Neil Diamond, Van Halen and Fleetwood Mac were among the names given by Azoff as artists planning to tour in 2011.

You know, I have absolutely no problem with a band touring in support of a new project.  However, the last time Fleetwood Mac had something new to plug was 2003's Say You Will.  And, speaking as a former long-time Fleetwood Mac fan, that wasn't really anything to be that proud of.  Regardless of how bad Say You Will was, the band still had new material to promote and there were a few new songs being performed live.  Then, there was the Unhinged Unleashed tour.  That came off as little more than a money-making endeavor full of bland performances and a setlist that was even more stale than a 100-year-old butter cookie.  The band didn't even bother to create new promotional material for the Unleashed tour.  They simply re-used old Say You Will material.

What will the band be promoting this time around?  Rumours:  The 1,000th Re-Release?  Rumours of the Greatly, Greater, Greatest and Even More Great Hits of Fleetwood Mac?  Or perhaps they will be flogging the country version of Rumours that it has been rumored Stevie Nicks is in Nashville working on.  Does the world really need to hear Taylor Swift flatly singing Dreams, Carrie Underwood bellowing out Go Your Own Way or Brad Paisley checking the Gold Dust Woman for ticks?  I know Stevie loves to grandmother new female artists and she probably leaped at the chance to get to re-make Fleetwood Mac's most successful record because of getting to work with the likes of Swift and Underwood.  That still doesn't justify a country version of Rumours, in my humble opinion.

As we all know, just because something is announced doesn't mean it is set in stone when it comes to the entertainment industry.  With Dave Stewart having already made quite the issue out of working with Stevie Nicks on material for a solo project for the bedazzled beauty and Nicks returning the favor by appearing on a track on Stewart's new album it will be interesting to see how Stevie manages to fit her solo career in with another outing in the "boys club" she feels Fleetwood Mac has become.  Quite frankly, I think Stevie should put herself above the band because at this point, brand new solo material from Stevie is a much better idea than another greatest hits tour from Fleetwood Mac.

Source:  http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/07/a-kinder-friendlier-live-nation-entertainment-maybe-if-the-media-stops-scaring-artists.html

Newly Discovered Dinosaur: Mojoceratops

Paleontologist Nicholas Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University discovered and named the dinosaur after the heart-shaped frill around its head.  After a round of beers with some colleagues, Longrich decided upon the name "Mojoceratops".  The name was thought of to be a joke, at first, but the name stuck even though Longrich tried to come up with a more serious name.  The dinosaur's full and official name is Mojoceratops perifania.

Mojoceratops belongs to the chasmosaurine ceratopsid family and was a plant eater roughly the size of a hippopotamus.  Chasmosaurine ceratopsid's are characterized by elaborate frills on their skulls.  It lived around 75 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period, some 10 million years before the Triceratops, Mojo's more well-known cousin.  It is related to another dinosaur species found in Texas in the United States but Mojoceratops lived only in the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.  It walked the earth for a mere 1 million years before dying out.

Longrich made his discovery by researching dinosaur fossils in American and Canadian museums.

Read this article for more information about this new dinosaur with a cool name and to see a picture of its frilled skull.

Horned Dinosuar Possibly Moved From Island to Island Into Europe

There have been several great dinosaur stories in science news lately.  This latest discovery is just as exciting as the others recently reported.

Horned dinosaurs, known as ceratopsians, were plentiful during the late Cretaceous, roughly 100 million to 65 million years ago  (Ceratopsians include such well-known dinosaurs as Triceratops.)  It wasn't until scientists found a new small horned dinosaur, possibly a dwarf dinosaur, in Europe that they believed ceratopsians lived only in Asia and North America.

Three skull bones belonging to the horned dinosaur, Ajkaceratops kozmai, were unearthed in the summer of 2009 in a Hungarian quarry near the town of Ajka.  Fully grown, the newly discovered dinosaur grew to a tiny 3 feet long.  Dwarf dinosaurs did live in what we now know as Transylvania.

In 2007, scientists reported fossil teeth that could have been ceratopsian having been found in Sweden.  But the Hungarian find is the first clear discovery of a horned dinosaur in Europe.

The newly revealed small horned dinosaur lived roughly 85 million years ago and, at that time, much of what is now Europe was part of a complex series of island chains known as the Tethyan archipelago.  These islands were situated between the African and Eurasian land masses in the Tethys Ocean.  It is theorized that the small horned dinosaur moved from island to island thus eventually ending up in what we know as Europe.

For more information and to see a photo of a research team excavating the remains of the small horned dinosaur, please refer to this MSNBC.com Technology and Science article.

500 Million Year Old Mollusk Identified

It was discovered in British Columbia, Canada and looks like a cross between a shrimp and cartoon alien but it is actually one of the world's oldest and most primitive cephalopods. 

It's name is Nectocaris pteryx pushes the origins of cephalopods back at least 30 million years making them one of the longest lasting animal groups on Earth.  Cephalopods include modern octopi, squids and cluttlefish.

Martin Smith, a paleobiologist at the Royal Ontario Museum's Department of Natural History told Discovery News "modern cephalopods display a quite astonishing intelligence, and I like to think that Nectocaris may have been the smartest critter in the Cambrian sea."

Smith and his colleague, Jean-Bernard Caron studied at least 91 Nectocaris fossils found from the Burgess Shale, located in Yoho National Park near Field, British Columbia.  Thanks to the exceptional preservation of soft-bodied animals Burgess Shale is known for, the paleobiologists were able to get an idea as to what primitive cephalopods looked like.

Nectocaris did not have a hard shell contrary to what most scientists had thought for decades.  According to Smith, "shells evolved much later, probably in response to increased levels of competition and predation in the Late Cambrian."

Nectocaris was approximately 2 inches long, quite small by modern cephalopod standards, and swam using its large lateral fins.  It could accelerate to high speeds by using a nozzle-like funnel to squirt out water.  It was kite-shaped and flat from top to bottom with large, stalked eyes and a long pair of grasping tentacles. 

Other scientists have wondered why Nectocaris lacked such cephalopod features as a ring of tentacles around the mouth, a beak and a radula.  According to Smith, he and Caron were able to identify some possible mouthparts but that they weren't well preserved for them to describe in detail.

Highlights from the Royal Ontario Museum's Burgess Shale collection will go on display in its future Peter F. Bronfman Gallery of Early Life.  They will also be able to be seen on the Virtual Museum of Canada Burgess Shale website which will be launched in the spring of 2011.

For more information on this interesting mollusk and to see an artists rendition of what Nectocaris would have looked like you can read the MSNBC.com Technology and Science article and find further information in the Vancouver Sun's Technology section.

I Vant To Talk Dinosaurs...

O.K. I sincerely apologize for the title. It was a bad joke, I know, but it had a purpose!

I've got another post for you about dinosaurs today and I think this one is very cool.

In the area of the world we know today as Transylvania, Romania (yes, the same place famous for Vlad the Impaler and Dracula, hence the bad title joke) there once lived a dwarf dinosaur around 70-75 million years ago.

For years, scientists have debated the remains of the dinosaur, Magyarosaurus dacus, as to whether they were really a dwarf species or if they were simply babies that had yet to grow into adulthood. What made the debates even more important was that Magyarosaurus dacus belongs to a species of dinosaurs known as titanosaurs which were giant plant-eating dinosaurs or sauropods.

One of the largest titanosaurs, Argentinosaurus, was as large as 10 African Elephants. Their weight could reach as much as 220,000 pounds. Magyarosaurus dacus tipped the scales at a mere 230 pounds and was about the size of a horse. That's quite a difference in size there!

Scientists have been studying the bone structure of the Magyarosaurus dacus remains and they have determined that the bones did come from fully grown animals and they have solid evidence to back that up.

Small bones were discovered in 1895 on a Transylvanian estate by the sister of paleontologist Franz Baron Nopcsa. Then, Nopcsa determined the bones came from a dwarf dinosaur. About the same time as the Nopsca bones were discovered, another paleontologist had turned up dwarf mammals, such as tiny elephants and hippopotamuses, on a Mediterranean island. The name Magyarosaurus dacus was given to the bones by Franz Baron Nopcsa in honor of his home country. Other titanasaur bones were found at later dates but those bones belonged to the larger variety. These discoveries led to the belief that Magyarosaurus dacus was a young dinosaur.

Isn't it fascinating that, without modern technology, a paleontologist in 1895 was able to determine what took our modern scientists years to figure out? Franz Baron Nopcsa was truly very good at what he did.

You can see an artists sketch of the dwarf dinosaur here at Livescience.com and read more about the dino itself here in MSNBC's Tech and Science Section.

New Species of Ancient Flying Reptile Discovered

If you've read any of the past posts in this blog you know I am a huge fan of news about the discovery of a new species. I've talked about a few, exciting new discoveries, recently. However, this new species discovery is quite different from those I've talked about previously.

This new discovery isn't an animal you'll be able to travel to some remote location of the globe to try and catch a glimpse of or one that you'll be reading about conservation efforts to protect. This new discovery is about a species of flying reptile that lived almost 95 million years ago according to scientists.

The flying reptile, or pterosaur, had a wingspan of 9 feet and flew over what is currently the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Northern Texas in the United States. A fossilized jaw was discovered embedded in soft, powdery shale during an excavation of a hillside next to a highway in the area in 2006.

New analysis of the jaw suggests it belongs to a never-before-known genus of pterosaur named Aetodactylus halli. It was named after the individual who discovered it, Lance Hall, a hobbyist fossil hunter and member of the Dallas Paleontological Society. The animal was identified and named by Timothy S. Myers of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

The jaw measures about 15 inches (38 centimeters) long and originally contained 54 slender, pointed teeth. Only two teeth were still intact at the time of discovery. The discovery of a pterosaur with teeth was surprising to scientists as all North American pterosaurs were toothless with the exception of the Coloborhynchus.

While the Aetodactylus halli isn't something we'll ever get to actually see in the wild I still think this is a pretty fascinating and remarkable discovery.

For more information about this discovery and to see a photo of the jaw discovered by Lance Hall refer to this article.