As someone who works on Silurian age fossils, I can't help but be jealous every time a new mammoth "fossil" is found in permafrost. I'm using quotation marks here around because these mammoth corpses can barely be considered to be fossils. My fossils are traces of rock on rock. Whereas, these mammoth corpses are so fresh, the discoverers have problems keeping their dogs from tucking in.
I like to think of palaeontology as a historical science. We use science as a tool to speculate and test ideas about the history of life on Earth. The alternative is mythology, where we create ideas about the history of life to make a good story, without any grounding in fact.Take the question, “how did the rhinoceros get its skin”. On the one hand, we have a
scientific study in 2009; that compares folding across many rhinoceroses and examines the blood vessel network. They suggest that the skin evolved its folds to help keep the rhino cool. Rudyard Kipling, however, gives us another hypothesis.
Never in a million years.That was my first reaction to finding out that the University of Leicester (where I am based) was about to commence an archaeological dig to uncover the bones of Richard III.But, a press conference this morning has showed be to be totally wrong - or at least, woefully pessimistic. Because, it seems that a team of archeaologists has uncovered some bones that are indeed very likely to have been Richard III's.
I forgot my phone charger for the conference I went to last week.If this was just a year ago then I would barely have noticed. Mostly because my trusty old Nokia that I had then would have lasted long enough (I mean, the conference was only 2 friggin days long), but also because now, I rely on my phone for everything. Not just making phone calls (which I routinely forget it can do) but reading feeds, checking Twitter, facebook, but most importantly, checking my email.Well, the upshot of this was that when I finally turned my phone on after being bereft of it for a sunny couple of days, I was presented with a glut of emails saying that people had been commenting on my blog.
"To her who appears in the sky to her who appears in the skyI want to address my greeting to the hierodule who appears in the skyI want to address my greeting to the great queen of heaven, Inanna [ancient Sumerian name for Venus]I want to address my greeting to her who fills the sky with her pure blaze to the luminous one to Inanna as bright as the sun to the great queen of heaven."An ancient Sumerian hymn to Venus, written by priests
Every 6 months or so these days it feels like we find the earliest animal life. More often than not, said life is something ugly that turns up in a bucket after dissolving rocks in acid.Well, it's been a while, but here is the latest candidate:
I think most people - certainly myself - get that grim "what, another one?" feeling when you first hear news that there has been a big earthquake.But is it justified? In other words, have we recently been experiencing an increased rate of earthquakes? This from Beroza (2012),
[Their] monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist - George MonbiotWant to know where a huge amount of taxpayers' money invested into science goes?Straight into the pockets of publishing companies' shareholders.
Mention "Mass Extinction" and most people will immediately think of the extinction that killed the dinosaurs.To be fair, this was pretty big, as far as extinctions go. Not only did it kill all of the non-avian dinosaurs, it also finished off the ammonites, belemnites, all of the large swimming reptiles, and many, many others. It's almost like all mammals being killed today.So yes, pretty big. The K-T extinction, as it's called, ranks among the top 5 greatest extinctions in Earth's paleozoic history.But it's peanuts to the P-T extinction.To put it in perspective, at the K-T extinction, about 60% of life on Earth died out. At the P-T extinction, it was about 95%. So it's fair to say that this was when the Earth nearly died.
It's not often that paleontology makes the news. This week, however, it did - in a big way. And let me tell you, it wasn't the edgy paper on a new assemblage of South American bivalves ("Barremian Bivalves from the Huitrín Formation, West-Central Argentina: Taxonomy and Paleoecology of a Restricted Marine Association") that was all over the rolling news channels.No; it's the news that Archaeopteryx may be knocked off its pedestal as the earliest bird in the fossil record, based on a new phylogeny by Xu et al. Archaeopteryx is now deemed to be just another deinonychosaur; probably closer to velociraptor than to birds.
There hasn't been much of a debate about this paper at Science 2.0, so I thought I might briefly review it, and see what everybody else thinks. But, before we start, I should make one thing clear. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not even an evolutionary psychologist; I'm a paleontologist. And I should also make it clear that I am often very dubious of a lot of the findings of evolutionary psychologists, which often seem to me like pontificating on very banal things with very little actual science going on.
Here's a question. In many millions of years time, is it possible that future geologists - be they our distant descendants, or an alien race that has since conquered Earth - will be able to look at the sequence of rocks corresponding to the present period, and recognise the moment when humans became the dominant species on the planet? If so, what time will this horizon represent, and how will it be recognised?
"To her who appears in the skyto her who appears in the skyI want to address my greetingto the hierodule who appears in the skyI want to address my greetingto the great queen of heaven, Inanna [ancient Sumerian name for Venus]I want to address my greetingto her who fills the sky with her pure blazeto the luminous oneto Inannaas bright as the sunto the great queen of heaven." An ancient Sumerian hymn to Venus, written by priests
