All Articles Tagged As: fossils
An international team of researchers has completed a new study on Homo floresiensis, commonly referred to as the "hobbit," a 3-foot-tall, 18,000-year-old hominin skeleton, discovered four years ago on the Indonesian island of Flores.
...> Full Article
 | A fossilized whale skeleton excavated 20 years ago amid the stench and noise of a seabird and elephant seal rookery on California's Año Nuevo Island turns out to be the youngest example on the Pacific coast of a fossil whale fall and the first in California, according to paleontologists. ...> Full Article |
 | The discovery of the first anatomically modern ear in a group of 260 million-year-old fossil reptiles significantly pushes back the date of the origin of an advanced sense of hearing, and suggests the first known adaptations to living in the dark. ...> Full Article |
 | The fossil record seems to indicate that the diversity of marine creatures increased and decreased over hundreds of millions of years in step with predator-prey encounters ...> Full Article |
 | An 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossil unearthed in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia demonstrates that miniaturization, long thought to be a hallmark of bird origins and a necessary precursor of flight, occurred progressively in primitive dinosaurs. ...> Full Article |
 | Searching for a different kind of riches in the ground, an oil company made a priceless find it never expected. ...> Full Article |
 | Archaeological proof of the Biblical description of Israel really as "the land of milk and honey" (or at least the latter) has been uncovered by researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology. ...> Full Article |
 | With the eye of an electrical engineer, Nels Peterson is hoping to bring a new, high-tech tool to the field excavation of dinosaurs, a labor of picks, shovels and brushes that has changed little over the past 100 years. ...> Full Article |
 | In a groundbreaking study, two Harvard scientists have for the first time extracted human DNA from ancient artifacts. The work potentially opens up a new universe of sources for ancient genetic material, which is used to map human migrations in prehistoric times. ...> Full Article |
 | Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs. ...> Full Article |
 | The coconut has been popular in lore and on palates for centuries, yet little is known about the history of coconut's domestication and dispersal around the world. ...> Full Article |
 | The DNA of ancient microorganisms, long frozen in glaciers, may return to life as the glaciers melt, according to a paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Boston University. The article is scheduled to appear in the print edition on Tuesday, Aug. 14. ...> Full Article |
University of Queensland researchers have identified microbial remains in some of the oldest preserved organic matter on Earth, confirmed to be 3.5 billion years-old.
...> Full Article
 | A 400 million-year-old fossil of a coelacanth fin, the first finding of its kind, fills a shrinking evolutionary gap between fins and limbs. University of Chicago scientists describe the finding in a paper highlighted on the cover of the July/August 2007 issue of Evolution & Development. ...> Full Article |
Researchers from Saint Louis University (SLU) and Peking University in China are revealing for the first time the findings of a discovery that could change the way we think about the development of life on Earth.
...> Full Article
 | The abundant diversity of characteristics within species likely helped fuel the proliferation and evolution of an odd-looking creature that emerged from an unprecedented explosion of life on Earth more than 500 million years ago. University of Chicago paleontologist Mark Webster reports this finding in the July 27 issue of the journal Science. ...> Full Article |
 | In paleontology, discovery can be dirty. And the search can lead to some rugged places. This summer, Lamar University students and their professor, Jim Westgate, headed for the Badlands of Utah to do some paleontological prospecting. ...> Full Article |
 | Fossils discovered in the oft-painted arroyos of northern New Mexico show for the first time that dinosaurs and their non-dinosaur ancestors lived side by side for tens of millions of years, disproving the notion that dinosaurs rapidly replaced their supposedly outmoded predecessors. ...> Full Article |
 | Scientists working in the Woranso-Mille area of the Afar Region, Ethiopia, have recovered fossils that may prove to be a bridge to establishing a relationship between the earlier Australopithecus anamensis (4.2 - 3.9 million years) and the later Australopithecus afarensis (3 - 3.6 million years) early human species. ...> Full Article |
 | Ancient Greenland was green. New Danish research has shown that it was covered in conifer forest and had a relatively mild climate. Professor Eske Willerslev has analysed the world's oldest DNA, preserved under the kilometre-thick icecap. The DNA is likely close to half a million years old, and the research results are overturning all previous assumptions about biological life and the climate in Greenland. The results have just been published in Science. ...> Full Article |
 | Giant prehistoric penguins? In Peru? It sounds more like something out of Hollywood than science, but a researcher from North Carolina State University along with U.S., Peruvian and Argentine collaborators has shown that two heretofore undiscovered penguin species reached equatorial regions tens of millions of years earlier than expected and during a period when the earth was much warmer than it is now. ...> Full Article |
 | The discovery of a 65-million-year-old fossil in Mongolia offers new evidence that mammals began to thrive only after the dinosaurs died off. ...> Full Article |
 | The fossilized bones of a previously unknown, 220 million-year-old long-necked, gliding reptile may remain forever embedded in stone, but thanks to an industrial-size CT scanner at Penn State's Center for Quantitative Imaging, the bone structure and behavior of these small creatures are now known. ...> Full Article |
 | Case assistant professor harvests the fossilized bones of animals from South America ...> Full Article |
 | The peculiar pose of many fossilized dinosaurs, with wide-open mouth, head thrown back and recurved tail, likely resulted from the agonized death throes typical of brain damage and asphyxiation, according to two paleontologists. ...> Full Article |
 | New charcoal and plant microfossil evidence from Mexico's Central Balsas valley links a pivotal cultural shift, crop domestication in the New World, to local and regional environmental history. Agriculture in the Balsas valley originated and diversified during the warm, wet, postglacial period following the much cooler and drier climate in the final phases of the last ice age. A significant dry period appears to have occurred at the same time as the major dry episode associated with the collapse of Mayan civilization, Smithsonian researchers and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences online. ...> Full Article |
Scientists from the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge have discovered that Mother Nature caused a massive ozone depletion event, some 251 million years ago, during the greatest mass extinction event of all time.
...> Full Article
 | A surprisingly complete fossil skull of an ancient relative of humans, apes and monkeys bears striking evidence that our remote ancestor was less mentally advanced than expected by about 29 million years ago. ...> Full Article |
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory geologists have put out a call for teeth tusks, femurs and any and all other parts of extinct mammoths left by massive Ice Age floods in southeastern Washington.
...> Full Article
 | Scientists at the University of Chicago and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., have produced new evidence to finally resolve the mysterious identity of what they regard as one of the weirdest organisms that ever lived. ...> Full Article |
 | A spectacular fossilised forest has transformed our understanding of the ecology of the Earth’s first rainforests. ...> Full Article |
 | An international research team including a Cardiff expert has found evidence of the Earth’s earliest forest trees, dating back 385 million years. ...> Full Article |
Remnants from a cave embedded in a limestone quarry southwest of Chicago have yielded a fossil trove that may influence the known history of north central Illinois some 310 million years ago.
...> Full Article
 | Something old is now something new, thanks to Lamar University researcher Jim Westgate and colleagues. The scientists' research has led to the discovery of a new genus and species of primate, one long vanished from the earth but preserved in the fossil record. ...> Full Article |
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing have been studying a 40,000-year-old early modern human skeleton found in China and have determined that the "out of Africa" dispersal of modern humans may not have been as simple as once thought.
...> Full Article
|
|
Subscribe
