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A 20-million-year-old bat fly was discovered in a mine in the Dominican Republic, the first fossilized fly of its type ever found. Its descendants are still around, sucking blood from modern bats, but scientists did not know how far back these parasites existed. But what’s even more enlightening is that this fly carried an ancient strain of bat malaria, of a species new to science. George Poinar, Jr. of Oregon State University found the fly, and also found the malaria while examining the fly under a microscope.
Before he became a specialist in ancient diseases inside equally ancient bugs, Poinar had worked on attempting to extract DNA from insects trapped in amber—work which author Michael Crichton has acknowledged as part of his inspiration for Jurassic Park.
But no ancient bats will be reconstructed from this specimen, even if it were possible.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Poinar said, “this specimen is so rare that we wouldn’t want to attempt to try it.”
Read more about the bat fly at National Geographic News. Link
From the look of the fossilized skull, you’d think this was a Smilodon, a sabertooth tiger. But no, this is Thylacosmilus, not a cat at all, but an ancient form of today’s marsupials. Note the strange lower jaw that runs the length of the saber teeth. Read more about Thylacosmilus at TYWKIWDBI. Link
A prehistoric creature found in the Canadian Rockies has been named Siphusauctum gregarium, which is both a new genus and species. It lived 500 million years ago, when the area now nickenamed the “Tulip Beds” was underwater.
Siphusauctum has a long stem, with a calyx – a bulbous cup-like structure – near the top which encloses an unusual filter feeding system and a gut. The animal is thought to have fed by filtering particles from water actively pumped into its calyx through small holes. The stem ends with a small disc which anchored the animal to the seafloor. Siphusauctum lived in large clusters, as indicated by slabs containing over 65 individual specimens.
Lorna O’Brien, a PhD candidate in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Toronto and her supervisor Jean-Bernard Caron, curator of invertebrate palaeontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, report on the discovery today in the online science journal PLoS ONE.
“Most interesting is that this feeding system appears to be unique among animals. Recent advances have linked many bizarre Burgess Shale animals as primitive members of many animal groups that are found today but Siphusauctum defies this trend. We do not know where it fits in relation to other organisms,” said O’Brien.
(Image credit: Royal Ontario Museum)
Ryan Carney and his colleagues at Brown University released a scientific paper on the feathers of the Archaeopteryx today. Carney celebrated by having an Archaeopteryx feather tattooed on his arm, thereby gaining himself an entry in Carl Zimmer’s science tattoo collection. But what about the Archaeopteryx?
The first fossil of Archaeopteryx was a single feather–the one that Carney has turned into a tattoo. It was discovered in 1861 in a limestone quarry near the town of Solnhofen and brought to Hermann von Meyer, one of Germany’s leading paleontologists at the time. As scientists would later determine, this exceptional feather was 145 million years old. Despite its antiquity, the feather looked much like the feathers on the wings of living birds.
The fossil was so extraordinary that Von Meyer wondered if some forger had etched it. After all, Solnhofen limestone was prized for making finely detailed lithographic prints. But then von Meyer compared the slab and the counterslab and found them to be identical.
Now 150 years later, we know a lot more about the Archaeopteryx and how it fits in the evolution of dinosaurs to birds. Read how many of these discoveries came about at The Loom. Link
We don’t know about Sasquatch, but we know a giant ape we call Gigantopithecus roamed South Asia until about 300,000 years ago. Gigantopithecus resembled a ten-foot-tall orangutan and weighed about three times as much as a large gorilla. What happened to these great apes?
The features of the dentition—large, flat molars, thick dental enamel, a deep, massive jaw—indicate Gigantopithecus probably ate tough, fibrous plants (similar to Paranthropus). More evidence came in 1990, when Russell Ciochon, a biological anthropologist at the University of Iowa, and colleagues (PDF) placed samples of the ape’s teeth under a scanning electron microscope to look for opal phytoliths, microscopic silica structures that form in plant cells. Based on the types of phyoliths the researchers found stuck to the teeth, they concluded Gigantopithecus had a mixed diet of fruits and seeds from the fig family Moraceae and some kind of grasses, probably bamboo. The combination of tough and sugary foods helps explain why so many of the giant ape’s teeth were riddled with cavities. And numerous pits on Gigantopithecus‘s teeth—a sign of incomplete dental development caused by malnuntrition or food shortages—corroborate the bamboo diet. Ciochon’s team noted bamboo species today periodically experience mass die-offs, which affect the health of pandas. The same thing could have happened to Gigantopithecus.
Read more about Gigantopithecus at Smithsonian’s Hominid Hunting blog. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Lindsay Holmwood)
Remember
the Neanderthals you see in the museum or on the glossy pages of The National
Geographic? Those are the works of paleoartists, a rare breed of people
that create the fanciful visuals to accompany the dry data of paleontology.
Meet two such paleoartists, the twin brothers Alfons and Adrie Kennis of the Netherlands:
Link (Photo: Alice Roberts/Evolution: The Human Story)Do they consider themselves artists? "Noooo. We are no artists," says one or the other — to be honest, they sound identical on tape. Are they rich? "Nooooo," they laugh in unison. "Look," says either Alfons or Adrie, pointing at one of their reconstructions, "We used the hair of a Scottish Highlander." The hair is russet-colored and has been implanted in the head of a silicon-faced Neanderthal. What kind of Scottish men donate their hair to the paleoartistry industry? "A cow, a cow," scream the Kennises: The hair comes from Highland cattle.
The Kennises have caused some ripples in the museum world. Paleoartists are as susceptible as any of us to their own imaginations. "Artists, even scientific professors, can romanticize the past like everyone else," says Alfons. Hence, what you'll see depicted as an early example of Homo erectus, in museums, in books, or on television, is often wildly inaccurate, as influenced by fantasy or fashion as anything in a glossy magazine. You'll see prehistoric humans depicted with gleaming white teeth or smooth pale skin. "People have fantasies about what it's like to live most of your life in the outdoors," says Alfons. "It is a hard life." The Kennises don't do smooth. They don't do expressionless either. If the bones show that a prehistoric human incurred an injury to his jaw that would give him a tooth infection, this is what the Kennises will imply in the face of their reconstruction.
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Megalonyx jeffersonii
Fossils rarely do scientists the courtesy of showing up intact, so putting them together is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. A tough one. Without a picture on the box to go by. It’s no wonder a few old bones have made some of the world’s smartest scientists look so stupid.
1. All the President’s Sloths
In decades past, American presidents apparently had hobbies other than playing golf and eating at McDonald’s. Thomas Jefferson, for one, was an avid paleontologist. As early as the 1790s (before it was cool), he kept an impressive fossil collection at his home in Monticello. So when a group of confused miners came upon some unidentifiable bones in a West Virginia cave, they sent them to Jefferson. Judging from the long limbs and large claws, the president suspected they belonged to a giant cat “as preeminent over the lion in size as the mammoth is over the elephant” and that the animal might still exist somewhere in the unexplored West.
Jefferson got the size right. The description? Not so much. The animal he named Megalonyx (giant claw) was actually one of the giant ground sloths that very slowly roamed America during the last ice age. And while Jefferson later agreed with this alternative diagnosis, his error wasn’t a complete waste. The Megalonyx marked one of the first important fossil finds in the United States, and it prompted the first and second scientific papers on fossils published in North America. In honor of the president’s contribution, the sloth’s name was later formalized to Megalonyx jeffersonii.
2. A Bone-headed Approach
To this day, the Brontosaurus remains one of the most popular and recognizable dinosaurs in history – an impressive feat for an animal that never existed. The confusion started in 1879, when collectors working in Wyoming for paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh found two nearly complete – yet headless – sauropod dinosaur skeletons. Wanting to display them, Marsh fitted one specimen with a skull found nearby, and the other with a skull he found in Colorado. Voila! – the Brontosaurus was born.
(Image credit: Flickr user yuan2003)
Unfortunately for Marsh, the skeletons were later exposed as adult specimens of a dinosaur already discovered, the Apatosaurus. The error was formally corrected in 1903 by Elmer Riggs of Chicago’s Field Museum, and scientific papers haven’t called the animal Brontosaurus since. Seventy more years passed before researchers determined that the skulls Marsh borrowed really belonged to the Camarasaurus, a discovery of his archrival, Edward Drinker Cope. Pop culture, however, missed the memo altogether.
3. Getting Your Head Screwed on Right
Paleontology’s version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, Marsh and Cope had a nasty and long-running professional rivalry. Although they’d actually started out as friends (with each even naming a discovery after the other), by 1870 their relationship had taken a turn for the worse. A year earlier, Cope had assembled a skeleton of the sea reptile called Elasmosaurus. However, in his rush to publish his discovery, he placed the head on the wrong end, giving everyone the impression that the animal had a very long tail instead of a very long neck. Marsh poured ample salt in that wound by making fun of Cope’s error in print (suggesting he rename the animal “twisted lizard”) and constantly ridiculing it at parties and exhibitions. Given the stakes, he might as well have slapped Cope across the face with a glove and insulted his mother. As it was, all Cope could do was try and buy up all the published examples of his posterior-backwards construction.
Incorrect image of Elasmosaurus published by Cope.
The feud only grew from there. The two men fought over allegations that, on a tour of Cope’s digging operations in New Jersey, Marsh bribed collectors to send key fossils to him. And in 1877, a part-time collector in Utah incited a whole new string of cutthroat arguing by trying to sell bones from his site to both of them. Other feud highlights included a series of snippy “he said, he said” pieces in the New York Herald and the time the Smithsonian confiscated much of Marsh’s fossil collection after Cope accused him of misusing tax dollars to hoard fossils for himself.
more …
The earth saw a mysterious episode of global warming 56 million years ago due to a surge of carbon into the atmosphere. Animals could walk from continent to continent and never see ice. That period is called PETM, or the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, and it changed everything about life on earth. Paleontologist Philip Gingerich has been studying the fossil record of the era for forty years, mainly in the Bighorn Basin, just east of Yellowstone National Park.
During the PETM itself a strange thing happened to some mammals: They got dwarfish. Horses in the Bighorn shrank to the size of Siamese cats; as the carbon ebbed from the atmosphere, they grew larger again. It’s not clear whether it was the heat or the CO2 itself that shrank them. But the lesson, says Gingerich, is that animals can evolve fast in a changing environment. When he first drove into the Bighorn four decades ago, it was precisely to learn where horses and primates came from. He now thinks that they and artiodactyls came from the PETM—that those three orders of modern mammals acquired their distinctive characteristics right then, in a burst of evolution driven by the burst of carbon into the atmosphere.
Learn more about the changes that happened during the PETM in the October issue of National Geographic magazine. Link
(Image credit: Ira Block)
Fossils of a 160-million-year-old mammal found in China show us a placental mammal that is 35 million years older than any found before. This tiny animal is named Juramaia sinensis, or “Jurassic mother from China.”
With forepaws adapted to climbing trees, the newfound eutherian scurried about temperate Jurassic forests feasting on insects under the cover of darkness. This diet allowed J. sinensis to tip the scales at around half an ounce (15 grams), making the creature lighter than a chipmunk.
“The great evolutionary lineage that includes us had a very humble beginning, in terms of body mass,” said Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, who led the team that discovered the fossil.
Although this discovery helps us fill in the blanks of mammals’ evolutionary timeline, the reason for the split between placental mammals and marsupials is still a mystery. Link -via The Caudal Lure
(Image credit: Mark A. Klinger, Carnegie Museum of Natural History)
Comments Off Performed by the group Brighter Lights, Thicker Glasses. Music teacher turned science teacher John Palmer wrote this song to help his students learn about the Cambrian Explosion. Some of them remember it ten years later! Link -via Boing Boing
Researchers at UC Berkeley and Smithsonian Institution paleontologists have collaborated on a study of gray whales and how they survived so many global climate changes. The result-gray whales varied their diets and adapted to a wider range of food sources in order to survive. This study shows that whales may adapt quite easily to whatever comes their way in the future. Read more about it at Art Daily.
The idea of giant bunny rabbits may remind you of Night of the Lepus, but this is no movie -it’s prehistory. A new species called the Minorcan King of the Rabbits (Nuralagus rex) has been discovered on the island of Minorca. It weighed over 26 pounds and had rather small ears compared to rabbits we know today. These rabbits flourished on the Mediterranean island between 5 and 3 million years ago.
“N. rex was a very robust and peculiar rabbit,” project leader Josep Quintana told Discovery News. “Surely he was a very calm and peaceful animal that moved with slow, but powerful, movements.”
Quintana, a scientist at the Catalan Institute of Paleontology, and colleagues Meike Kohler and Salvador Moya-Sola describe the giant fossil rabbit in a Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology paper. They believe the rabbit lost the ability to hop, because the long, springy spine typical of modern bunnies was replaced by a short, stiff backbone.
The researchers think N. rex spent most of its days peacefully digging, searching for roots and tubers to eat.
Link -via The Daily What
(Image credit: Meike Köhler)
If you haven’t studied dinosaurs since you were an elementary school student, you have some catching up to do! As paleontologists find more and different fossils, our body of knowledge about the prehistoric reptiles has changed. Take the Stegosaurus, for example. What we thought we knew just a few years ago is different from what we think we now know.
Fossil footprints and detailed studies of its anatomy have proven that Stegosaurus didn’t drag its tail on the mud, but actually walked erect, like an elephant, with its tail held horizontally, parallel to the ground. Its back wasn’t as arched as they had us believe, and the neck was not carried horizontally as usually depicted, but upright, like a bird’s.
Also, the tail spike cluster (known among paleontologists as the “thagomizer”) didn’t actually point upwards, but sideways. This made the tail a much deadlier and more efficient weapon; to stab an attacking predator, Stegosaurus only had to swing its tail horizontally; punctures matching the Stegosaurus’ tail spikes have been found in the bones of predatory dinosaurs from the same age and place, proving once and for all that Stegosaurus wasn’t any less dangerous than the ankylosaurs that would evolve later.
And that’s just the first of ten dinosaurs we once thought we knew. Link -via the Presurfer
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“Hmm? Oh don’t mind me. You know us bears, we like to lay back and relax after we’ve had a nice Coke… a-Cola bottling plant.”
Actually, the official biggest-ever bear hails from way back in the day, a time before soft drinks, CGI and NeutraSweet.
A male South American giant short-faced bear has just broken the record for world’s largest bear, according to a paper in this month’s Journal of Paleontology.
Standing 11 feet tall and weighing in at about 3,500 pounds, the bear, which lived in Argentina during the Pleistocene Ice Age, would have towered over the world’s largest individual bear from an existing species. That distinction belongs to a male polar bear that weighed in at 2,200 pounds.
A pterosaur fossil found in Liaoning Province, China, yields fascinating information about the prehistoric reptiles. Scientists believe the Darwinopterus pterosaur laid the now-fossil egg after it died.
Scientists think the adult was an expectant pterosaur mother that somehow broke her left wing, causing her to fall into the lake and drown. The body sank to the bottom and eventually expelled the egg.
“During the decay process, you get a buildup of gases and pressure inside the carcass, and that tends to expel things out,” said study co-author David Unwin, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester in the U.K. The egg “didn’t go very far. It just came out of the body and sat there.”
In addition to the associated egg, the fossil has a larger pelvis than other known Darwinopterus fossils, which is consistent with the animal being a female.
Chemical analysis of the egg suggests that, instead of laying hard-shell eggs and watching over the chicks, as most birds do, pterosaur mothers laid soft-shell eggs, which they buried in moist ground and abandoned.
The fossil gives clues as to how the eggs were formed and hatched, and since this is the first conclusively female fossil, we’re finding out more about sex differences in pterosaurs. Read more at National Geographic News. Link -Thanks, Marilyn!
(Image courtesy of Lü Junchang, Institute of Geology, Beijing)
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The biggest dinosaur discoveries of the year include dinosauromorphs, or dinosaur precursors, plus dinosaur diets, dino nurseries, and dinosaur colors. Shown is the feathered dinosaur Anchiornis, whose colors were determined by feather fossils. Check out the entire list, with links to further reading, at Smithsonian. Link -via The Dystenium Science Daily
(Image credit: Michael DiGiorgio)
When you think of prehistoric cats, you probably think of Smilodon, the saber-toothed tiger. There were plenty of other big cat species you may have never heard of, like the Xenosmilus, the cave lion, or the American lion. Pictured here is Machairodus kabir, which probably resembled a modern tiger with the addition of huge fangs. Oh, and it weighed over a thousand pounds! Link -via the Presurfer
Hundred of millions of years ago, sea creatures crawled up on land and started to become mammals. Then much later, a few went back into the sea, but left few fossils to show us how they did it -or at least that’s what we used to think.
For more than a century, our knowledge of the whale fossil record was so sparse that no one could be certain what the ancestors of whales looked like. Now the tide has turned. In the space of just three decades, a flood of new fossils has filled in the gaps in our knowledge to turn the origin of whales into one of the best-documented examples of large-scale evolutionary change in the fossil record. These ancestral creatures were stranger than anyone ever expected. There was no straight-line march of terrestrial mammals leading up to fully aquatic whales, but an evolutionary riot of amphibious cetaceans that walked and swam along rivers, estuaries and the coasts of prehistoric Asia. As strange as modern whales are, their fossil predecessors were even stranger.
These fossils raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read more at Smithsonian magazine. Link
Ischigualasto, meaning “the place where you put the moon” is a remote valley in Argentina. It is studded with geological formations left by wind erosion, amazing standing stones and boulders that are so rounded they look like enormous marbles. The valley’s once-fertile ground is now arid and contains so many plant and animal fossils that paleontologists come from all over the world to study them. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user Aylwin Lo)
October 13th is National Fossil Day! In commemoration, Wired Science has a gallery of recent discoveries that show how, no matter how much we dig, there’s always something new to learn about our past. Shown is a mysterious organism that lived about 2.1 billion years ago. Scientists haven’t determined whether the five-inch-wide life form was a colony of cells or an early animal. Link
(Image credit: Abderrazak El Albani and Arnaud Mazurier)
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Scientists have unearthed the fossilized remains of a prehistoric bird with a wingspan of 17 feet! The Latin name given to the new species, Pelagornis chilensis means “huge pseudoteeth” because it had bony tooth-like projections.
The enormous wingspan gave P. chilensis certain advantages, like the ability to travel long distances and reach areas of the open ocean thick with potential prey. The researchers think it feasted on fish and squid, and may have trolled its hunting grounds with its lower beak skimming the water until its teeth could clamp down on a wriggling meal. But lead researcher Gerald Mayr says that a 17-foot wingspan is probably close to the maximum for a flying bird.
The bird flew over South America between 10 and 5 million years ago, which means it may have been seen by our hominid ancestors. Link
Previously: Argentavis magnificens
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Since 1980, paleontologists have suggested that a terrible meteorite impact millions of years ago radically altered the Earth’s climate and killed off the dinosaur population. Now a study led by David Jolley of Aberdeen University proposes that there was a second major impact a few thousand years after the first:
In the current study, scientists examined the “pollen and spores” of fossil plants in the layers of mud that infilled the crater. They found that immediately after the impact, ferns quickly colonised the devastated landscape.
Ferns have an amazing ability to bounce back after catastrophe. Layers full of fern spores – dubbed “fern spikes” – are considered to be a good “markers” of past impact events.
However, there was an unexpected discovery in store for the scientists.
They located a second “fern spike” in a layer one metre above the first, suggesting another later impact event.
Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user moonlightbulb used under Creative Commons license
Paleontologist Philip Gingerich looks for sea monsters in the Egyptian desert. He assembles fossils of ancient whales that died there when it was covered by an ocean. One such whale is the Basilosaurus, which had small hind legs.
“Complete specimens like that Basilosaurus are Rosetta stones,” Gingerich told me as we drove back to his field camp. “They tell us vastly more about how the animal lived than fragmentary remains.”
Wadi Hitan—literally “valley of whales”—has proved phenomenally rich in such Rosetta stones. Over the past 27 years Gingerich and his colleagues have located the remains of more than a thousand whales here, and countless more are left to be discovered.
Researchers hope that whale fossils can help them understand how a land mammal evolved into an aquatic form that became our modern whales. Link
(Image credit: Richard Barnes/National Geographic)
Belgian scientist Olivier Lambert has discovered a new species of whale, a prehistoric sperm whale that was a real killer. Leviathan melvillei was the size of modern sperm whales, with a very big difference:
Today’s sperm whale has no functional teeth in its upper jaw and only small ones in its lower jaw (which are mostly used in fights). It feeds through suction, relying on a rush of water to carry its prey into its open mouth. But Leviathan’s mouth was full of huge teeth, the largest of which were a foot long and around 4 inches wide. This was no suction feeder! Leviathan clearly grabbed its prey with a powerful bite, inflicting deep wounds and tearing off flesh as killer whales do, but with a skull three times bigger.
Leviathan was at the very top of the food chain and it must have needed a lot of food. While modern sperm whales mainly eat squid, Lambert thinks that Leviathan used its fearsome teeth to kill its own kind – the giant baleen whales. At the same point in prehistory, baleen whales started becoming much bigger and they were certainly the most common large animals in the area that Leviathan lived in. Lambert thinks that the giant predator evolved to take advantage of this rich source of energy. He says, “We think that medium-size baleen whales, rich in fat, would have been very convenient prey for Leviathan.”
This whale swam off the coast of Peru 12 million years ago. There’s lots more about Leviathan melvillei at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Link
Ostrich eggshells with patterns engraved on them were found in Africa dating back 60,000 years. The eggshells were used to carry water.
The four different patterns and markings are repeated and believed to convey ownership or purpose and to differentiate the eggs from each other.
The researchers led by Pierre-Jean Texier, of the University of Bordeaux, said that before this discovery, the first signs of art, writing or ‘culture’ was thought to have been first shown in the late Stone Age between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago.
It included cave paintings dating back to 30,000 years BC, thought to be some of the earliest examples of decorative art or written communication.
But this latest discovery, which is much older, showed “collective identities and individual expressions” that were the beginning of modern civilised behaviour, they said.
In other words, writing. Or at least a form or communication that led to writing. The researchers examined 270 fragments of ostrich eggs found in South Africa. Link -via Scribal Terror
A couple of two million-year-old skeletons found in South Africa have been classified as a new species and named Australopithecus sediba. This discovery may be a “transitional species” between australopithecines and humans.
Growing to just over 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall, A. sediba has a number of key traits that some would say mark it as an early human, like Homo habilis, which many consider the first human species.
A. sediba, for example, had long legs and certain humanlike characteristics in its pelvis, which would have made it the first human ancestor to walk—perhaps even run—in an energy-efficient manner, the study says.
However, there are also many apelike traits in the new species. Link
(image credit: Brett Eloff)
From analysis of mitochondrial DNA extracted from a pinky finger bone, scientists have identified a new species of human ancestor. The 40,000-year-old bone fragment was found in a cave in the Altay mountains in Russia. The mitochondrial DNA shows that the person (they believe it was a child) it belonged to was neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens, but shared a common ancestor to both. University of Manchester geneticist Terry Brown co-authored an article released with the report in the journal Nature.
The new-human discovery implies that there was a wave of human migration out of Africa, the birthplace of humanity, that was completely unknown to science.
“We think Homo erectus”—an upright-walking but small-brained early human, or hominid—”was the first [hominid] to leave Africa two million years ago,” Brown explained. After that the record went blank until about 500,000 years ago, until now.
“This hominid seems to have left about a million years ago, so it fills in a bit of a gap,” he said.
Researchers will try to extract nuclear DNA from the bone, which carries more information than mitochondrial DNA. Link
(image credit: Johannes Krause)
The oldest dinosaur fossil ever found dates back around 230 million years. But the fossils of around a dozen specimens of a new animal called Asilisaurus kongwe, or silesaur, found in Tanzania lead researchers to believe dinosaurs diverged from another evolutionary line around 243 million years ago.
“Back then it was a very large river system, maybe something like the Mississippi today,” said lead author and University of Texas at Austin paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt. During that time, Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India were all one giant continent called Gondwana.
Though silesaurs are very closely related to dinosaurs, they lack the open hip-sockets that are universal in dinosaurs. The Asilisaurus was a small, four-legged creatures with a long tail. Their beak-like jaws and leaf-shaped teeth helped the animals eat the soft, fibrous leaves of the primordial palms, ferns and conifers that were prevalent during the Triassic period. That suggests that, while the animal may not have been exclusively vegetarian, a good portion of its diet came from plants, he said.
The silesaur changes the conventional wisdom that the dinosaur’s closest relatives were predators. Link
Scientists keep discovering extinct species that hardly seem possible outside of cartoons. If they were still around, we might not be! Web Urbanist shows us some of the biggest, fiercest, and weirdest of animals that are no more. For instance, the whorl shark had its own “jaw saw”!
Whorl Sharks
were similar to their modern cousins despite jetting along almost 300 million years ago. While modern sharks have rows of serrated teeth ready to replace any that fall out, the whorl shark has an interesting lower jaw that looked like a circular saw, where newer teeth would push older teeth further along the line. There’s some debate about the placement of the tooth structure, but regardless of its location in the mouth or deeper in the throat, it had a startlingly unique appearance.
Archaeology magazine has eight stories of archaeological hoaxes that made the news throughout history, with bonus links to their earlier articles about hoaxes.
The reasons for perpetrating hoaxes and forgeries range as widely as the kinds of fakes. Common motives for making bogus artifacts include publicity and self-promotion, monetary gain, practical jokes, and revenge, but some fakers have had the goal of supporting their own theories about the human past. Fakes have often been inspired by nationalism, with patriotic perpetrators boosting their country through spurious links to past civilizations.
People are taken in by hoaxes and fakes for many reasons. Successful bogus artifacts often match expectations or preconceived ideas of antiquities. Spectacular fakes have worked because those who buy them are blinded by their own pride of ownership–and the higher the price tag, the harder it is to make an embarrassing admission that it’s a fake.
Shown is the Fawcett idol, which led Percy Fawcett to search for Atlantis in the jungles of South America. He never returned. Link -via Metafilter
