Paleontology

Found: 245 Million Year-Old Fossilized Burrows Of Tetrapods

Paleontologists working in Antarctica have found fossilized burrows of tetrapods- land vertebrates with four legs or leglike appendages – dating from the Early Triassic epoch, about 245 million years ago. The fossils were created when fine sand from an ove ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 7 2008 - 8:17pm

Latvian Fossils Close The Gap Between Fish And Land Animals, Say Researchers

New exquisitely preserved fossils from Latvia cast light on a key event in our own evolutionary history, when our ancestors left the water and ventured onto land. Swedish researchers Per Ahlberg and Henning Blom from Uppsala University have reconstructed p ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 25 2008 - 7:27pm

Complete Mandible Of Homo Erectus Found In Casablanca Excavation

A complete mandible of Homo erectus was discovered at the Thomas I quarry in Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led by Jean-Paul Raynal, CNRS senior researcher at the PACEA[1] laboratory (CNRS/Université Bordeaux 1/ Ministry of Culture and Communicati ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 30 2008 - 9:44am

Phanerozoic Era Redux- Marine Species Diversity Less Dramatic Than Previously Thought

A new study challenges the long-held belief that diversity of marine species has been increasing continuously since the origin of animals. An international team carried out this decade-long study and concludes that most of the diversification occurred earl ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 7 2008 - 7:31pm

Mollusk Shells- Unique Climate Record Of Human Impact

Most people who find a seashell during their summer holiday on the coast will probably not be aware that they have found a unique record of the climate. For paleontologists, those hard calcium shells provide a profound insight into the history of our earth ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 9 2008 - 8:36pm

6000 Year-Old Jericho Bones May Help Combat Tuberculosis

Israelis and Palestinians working together? Indeed, when it comes to combating tuberculosis. Tuberculosis- or TB- is a deadly infectious bacterial disease that usually attacks the lungs. Acknowledged as a disease of crowds, it is transmitted from human to ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 14 2008 - 8:16am

Homo Liujiang Cranium Gets 3-D Brain Image Treatment

hominin fossils are the most important materials for exploring human origins and evolution. Since most hominin fossils are incomplete, or filled with a heavy calcified matrix, it is difficult or often impossible to reconstruct the endocast in a real fossi ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 16 2008 - 12:43am

Unravelling A Pre-Incan Mummy Mystery

Tulane University anthropologist Kit Nelson is the co-director of a National Geographic-sponsored team that is in the process of unraveling a mummy bundle found in Peru's historic Huaura Valley. The mummy is believed to have been an elite member of th ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 19 2008 - 10:14am

Soft Dinosaur Tissue Dispute- Probably Just Biofilm, Says Study

Paleontologists in 2005 hailed research that apparently showed that soft, pliable tissues had been recovered from dissolved dinosaur bones, a major finding that would substantially widen the known range of preserved biomolecules. But new research challenge ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 31 2008 - 3:24pm

Global Warming Off The Hook: Humans Implicated In Pre-Historic Australian Extinctions

Research led by UK and Australian scientists sheds new light on the role that our ancestors played in the extinction of Australia's prehistoric animals. The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the first evidence that ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 11 2008 - 11:16pm