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

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.

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

(Image credit: Royal Ontario Museum)

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

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:

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.

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.

For all the angst it caused them, though, Marsh and Cope’s constant one-upmanship was great for science. During their 20-some years of bickering, the two added 136 new species (including Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Diplodocus) to the nine that had previously been discovered in North America.

4. Pulling Teeth

Henry Fairfield Osborn was a giant in the field of paleontology, but he also has one giant mistake to his name. In 1922, while serving as president of the American Museum of Natural History, Osborn received a fossil of a tooth found in Nebraska. Suffering from a bout of overconfidence, the normally careful scientist published a paper announcing (based on one tooth, mind you) that he’d discovered Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, the first anthropoid ape unearthed in North America.

Amédée Forestier's illustration of Nebraska man

Taking into account that all of this was happening just three years before the Scopes Monkey Trial, word of a missing link was a pretty big deal. Add to that British anatomy professor Sir Grafton Elliott Smith touting the discovery as a potential breakthrough, and artist Amedee Forestier drawing a famously speculative picture of the “Nebraska Man” (and Woman) in the widely read Illustrated London News. Although Osborn never hypothesized where (or if) his ape fit into the evolutionary chain, he used the discovery to fuel his war of words with anti-evolution blowhard William Jennings Bryan. Osborn made sure to note the irony of the tooth having come from Bryan’s home state, and even suggested calling the ape Bryopithecus in honor of “the most distinguished primate which the state of Nebraska has thus far produced.”

Unfortunately, in this particular case, said distinguished primate got the last laugh. Upon further examination, it was determined that the tooth belonged to a millennia-old peccary – otherwise known as an ancient pig. In fairness to Osborn, the similarities between human and peccary teeth had already been noted in scientific literature, so it wasn’t that wild a guess. Of course, that didn’t stop creationists from pouncing on the mistake.

5. Creating a Monster

Long before there was a science called paleontology, people were trying to come up with explanations for giant bones found in the ground. And often, those explanations pointed to mythological creatures. Of all the fairy-tale creatures accused of inhabiting the ancient world, the griffin might claim the most direct connection to actual fossils. Usually depicted in folklore as a lion with an eagle’s head and wings, the griffin was said to fiercely guard its gold. The hybrid animal appears consistently in the art of ancient Rome, Greece, and Persia, and its legend apparently originated with Scythian nomads who wandered east toward Mongolia’s Gobi desert.

Griifin (left) and Protoceratops fossil

So how do fossils fit in? The Gobi is filled with the fossils of both the Protoceratops, a lion-size dinosaur with a birdlike beak, and of the similarly beaked Psittacosaurus. And while there were no massive hoards of gold around, the skeletons were often found guarding something arguably more valuable – hoards of eggs. The ancients were wrong about griffins, but that may have had more to do with misdiagnosing evidence than with legend or superstition.

6. Talk About Your Stale Food

Herodotus is considered the world’s first historian, but he came this close to also being the world’s first paleontologist. While traveling in Egypt, he noticed that the bricks used to build the pyramids had unusual, circular shapes petrified in them. What he saw were the sediment-preserved remains of ancient single-celled organisms. Of course, what he thought he saw were the remains of lentils eaten by the pyramid builders after a hard day of lugging around 2-ton pieces of stone.

Herodotus was pretty far off, but he redeemed himself later in his book Histories. In it, he noted that he saw shells in Egypt’s mountains, and rather than attribute them to a shellfish feast for pyramid builders, he correctly surmised that the animals lived in a sea that once covered the desert. “The Delta,” he wrote, “is formed of the deposits of the river, and has only recently, if I may use the expression, come to light.” Regardless, by overlooking the importance of the organisms he found, Herodotus unintentionally delayed for centuries the discovery of one of science’s most important fields. He made his observations in the 5th century BCE, and it took until the 1700s for serious thinkers to realize they were looking at extinct animals. We’re just saying, he could have saved us all a lot of time.

7. Lady in Red

Reverend William Buckland

When it comes to the battle between faith and science, it’s hard to be more conflicted than William Buckland. Both an ordained Anglican priest and a top-notch anatomist, Buckland holds the claim to fame for finding the oldest human remains on record – only he didn’t believe that’s what he’d found. As a Biblical literalist, Buckland strongly supported the notion of Noah’s flood. So, when he made a groundbreaking discovery by digging up prehistoric elephant and hyena bones in a Yorkshire cave in 1822, he concluded that they simply belonged to animals that had perished in the flood.

But that wasn’t all. A year later, while excavating a Welsh cave full of prehistoric animal remains, Buckland found a human skeleton deep in the sediment. Stained red by the surrounding iron and wearing ivory beads, the “Red Lady of Paviland” was, according to Buckland, a woman of ill-repute linked to the nearby remains of a Roman camp (as it couldn’t possibly be as old as all the other bones around it). Later research identified it as a 27,000-year-old man, but Buckland was too caught up in his religious devotion to accept the idea of ancient people in his homeland (or that a man would wear such extravagant jewelry).

8. A Tender Subject

An illustration of Scrotum humanum and the book containing it.

The first time a scientist attributed a fossil to an actual dinosaur was 1677, when museum director Robert Plot identified a bone fragment found in Oxfordshire, England, as part of the thigh bone of a (human) giant. Nearly 100 years later, scientist Richard Brookes gave the unknown species the unfortunate name Scrotum humanum because, well, the fossil did resemble a giant man’s nether regions when positioned a certain way. Naturally, it was (drum roll, please) William Buckland who found other pieces of the dinosaur nearby and gave the specimen the more suitable name Megalosaurus. Don’t worry, though. Buckland didn’t abandon his flood theory; he just figured this was a really big lizard that had drowned. He did, however, make the fossil the subject of the first-ever formal scientific paper on dinosaur remains.

9. Iguana Fix This

After its discovery in 1822, the Iguanodon became one of the first dinosaurs to achieve celebrity status. Depending on whom you believe, the massive plant-eater’s tooth was found by either Dr. Gideon Mantell or his wife. Regardless, Gideon was the one who realized the fossil came from an extinct category of reptile much larger than any still around.

Thanks to Mantell’s obsessive drive to find more bones, Iguanodon turned into a bit of a sensation, helped along by sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who made life-size models of Mantell’s animal. Most famously, at an 1853 dinner at London’s Crystal Palace, 21 prominent scholars dined inside Hawkin’s scale model of an Iguanodon.

The Crystal Palace Iguanodon

These sculptures were true to Mantell’s description of the animal. Unfortunately, that vision was terribly, terribly wrong. Among the mistakes? The animal walked on all fours (it turned out to be a biped) and had a horn on its nose (the hornlike bone was actually a spiked thumb). The Iguanadon has since undergone a massive makeover, as did Mantell. After his wife left him, he moved to London and became a full-time paleontologist. In 1838, he sold his fossil collection for the then-massive sum of 4,000 pounds (about $20,000).

10. For the Birds

Archaeopteryx fossil photographed in 1880.

There’ve been plenty of hoaxes in paleontology, from Piltdown man to the Cardiff Giant. Yet what makes the story of the Archaeopteryx so painful is that it wasn’t a fake at all. The animal’s crime? Sharing features with both birds and dinosaurs, and being discovered around the time that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was stirring up so much trouble.

The first Archaeopteryx fossil was found in 1860, and it was nothing more than an impression of a feather. Though initially skeptical, German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer verified that it was an ancient feather – but maybe not from a bird. So, a month later, when the same limestone quarry yielded a headless reptilian skeleton with the imprints of attached feathers, von Meyer looked pretty smart. While a number of key scientists needed to see it for themselves before believing the thing was real, other anti-Darwin paleontologists (most notably Andreas Wagner of Germany and Sir Richard Owen of Great Britain) jumped at the chance to dismiss the animal as a full-on reptile rather than a step on the evolutionary path to birds. But they were wrong. Later, when the clear reptile-bird link became indisputable, anti-evolutionists went from nitpicking the classification to calling the whole thing a hoax. As recently as 1990, physicist Lee Spetner famously (and falsely) claimed that the feathers were added to a reptile fossil by making impressions in cement and adding it to the mix. Despite efforts to smear their good name, six Archaeopteryx skeletons have now been found, all with the same bird-reptile blend.

_______________________________

The article above, written by Jeff Fleischer, is from the July-August 2007 issue of mental_floss magazine. It is reprinted here with permission.

Don’t forget to feed your brain by subscribing to the magazine and visiting mental_floss‘ extremely entertaining website and blog today!

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)

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)

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.

Link

“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)

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

“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.

Link

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)

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

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)

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

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)

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

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

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)

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.

Link

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

For instance, the rodent-like RatCroc had buckteeth for rooting through the ground after tubers or simple animals.

The flat-bodied PancakeCroc was the “ultimate sit-and-wait predator,” Sereno said. The animal would lie motionless and “wait for something stupid” to swim into its rail-thin, 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) jaws, which were lined with rows of spiky teeth.

DuckCroc had a long, smooth, sensitive nose to poke through vegetation as well as hook-shaped teeth to snag frogs and small fish in shallow water.

And the plant-eating DogCroc had lanky legs that meant it was likely spry enough to run into the water if threatened.

By far the mightiest of the lot, BoarCroc was a 20-foot-long (6.1-meter-long) “saber-toothed cat in armor” that ate dinosaurs for dinner.

DuckCroc and DogCroc were previously known to scientists, and the rest are new discoveries by a team headed by Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago. The expedition found fossils of all five in Niger and Morocco. Link (with video) -via Digg

(image credit: Mike Hettwer/National Geographic)

“These were big dinosaur versions of a Sherman tank,” Bill Parsons said. “They were armored and they withstood whatever came at them, and they just kept going.” T. cooneyorum was about 15 to 20 feet (4.5 to 6 meters) in length.

And this dinosaur had its share of protection, with two sets of stubby horns, one on the cheeks and the other around its eyes, two thick domes at the back of the skull and thickened areas around the nasal region.

Bill Parsons suspects T. cooneyorum was covered with hundreds or even thousands of bony plates equipped with spikes and a tail tipped with a club, similar to other ankylosaurs. Such protection, along with a swinging clubbed tail, would have kept at bay any of the small dinosaurs around at the time, Parsons said.

T. cooneyorum dates from around 112 million years ago. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Bill Parsons)

Fossils of flying reptiles come in two versions: the older long-tailed pterosaurs and the more recent short-tailed versions. The fossil gap between the two was a mystery until 20 skeletons of a new species were discovered early in 2009 in northeast China. The new pterosaur was named Darwinopterus in honor of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth.

“Darwinopterus came as quite a shock to us,” explained David Unwin part of the research team and based at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies. “We had always expected a gap-filler with typically intermediate features such as a moderately elongate tail – neither long nor short – but the strange thing about Darwinopterus is that it has a head and neck just like that of advanced pterosaurs, while the rest of the skeleton, including a very long tail, is identical to that of primitive forms”.

The discovery lends credence to the theory that evolution is not an even process, but contains periods of rapid evolution. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Mark Witton, University of Portsmouth)

White and his colleagues found so many teeth of different Ardipithecus individuals that they could compare male and female canines with some confidence. The male teeth turn out to be surprisingly blunted. This result suggests that hominids shifted away from a typical ape social structure early in our ancestry. If this was a result of males forming long-term bonds with females and helping raise young, this shift was able to occur while hominids were still living a very ape-like life. Ardipithecus existed about 2 million years before the oldest evidence of stone tools, suggesting that technology was not the trigger for the evolution of nice hominid guys.

There have been a couple of hominid bones found that are even older than Ardipithecus, but none with enough fossils to even begin reconstructing a skeleton. Link -via Metafilter

“It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum.

“They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.”

Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall.

“In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation,” Dr Scofield said.

Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: John Megahan/PLoS Biology)

“It is difficult to imagine how you can have something as soft and sloppy as an ink sac fossilised in three dimension, still black, and inside a rock that is 150 million years old.

“The structure is similar to ink from a modern squid so we can write with it. I suppose we could theoretically use it for food colouring, too, but I don’t think I will try tasting it.”

A sample of the ink has been sent to Yale University for further analysis. Link -via the Presurfer

(image credit: BMPS)

Perhaps the most surprising and most exciting application of this research is that it may allow us to predict the colors of many dinosaurs.

“These include many of our most well loved dinosaurs,” says Prum. “Like velociraptor, the dinosaur that chased the kids around the kitchen in Jurassic Park, was actually fully plumaged.”

While these dinosaur feathers were not used for flight until the appearance of the transitional species Archaeopteryx, the first known bird, they were probably useful for warmth. Prum says we could even learn more about the color of one of the most famous dinosaurs of all, Tyrannosaurus rex.

“In the classic mural The Age of Reptiles in the Yale Peabody museum, they depicted T-rex, which is one of the iconic, huge, bipedal, meat-eating dinosaurs,” he says. “Recent fossil discoveries have shown that the closest relative of these huge tyrannosaurids actually had tiny skin appendages or fossil feathers—’dino-fuzz.’

Link (with video) -via Metafilter

But the isotope data reveal that far from progressing steadily from mild to frigid, the climate became increasingly unstable heading into the last glacial maximum, swinging severely and abruptly. With that flux came profound ecological change: forests gave way to treeless grassland; reindeer replaced certain kinds of rhinoceroses. So rapid were these oscillations that over the course of an individual’s lifetime, all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna. And then, just as quickly, the environment could change back again.

Scientists are looking into the idea that Neandertals just weren’t as adaptable as modern humans, and over time lost out in the competition for resources in a changing world. Link -via Metafilter

Its skeleton, described in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B, represents the most complete remains ever excavated of a therizinosaur, meaning “reaper lizard.” It is one of only three such dinosaurs ever found in North America.

Lead author Lindsay Zanno told Discovery News that therizinosaurs, including the new Utah species, “are unusual in that they have small heads with a keratinous beak at the front of the mouth — the same material as the beak of modern birds — and small leaf-shaped teeth.”

“Their bellies are proportionally enormous, supporting large guts,” added Zanno, who is a researcher in the Department of Geology at The Field Museum. “They have greatly enlarged claws on their hands, short legs and tails, and four-toed feet.”

The dinosaur’s anatomy suggests it ate both plants and animals. Link

(image credit: Victor Leshyk)

Study author and palaeontologist Dr Kate Trinajstic, of Curtin University in Perth, says the clasper was discovered in a fish specimen uncovered in the Gogo region of Western Australia in 2001.

She says the team originally discounted the bone as the reproductive organ because they thought it was part of the pelvic gurdle.

On closer inspection, Trinajstic says they realised it was a sexual organ.

“We were surprised because it’s so big,” she says. “We were expecting something smaller.”

Link -via Digg

(image credit: John Long)

The meat-eating Banjo has been dubbed Australia’s answer to the feared Velociraptor.

“The cheetah of his time, Banjo was light and agile,” said Queensland Museum paleantologist Scott Hocknull, who is among the scientists being credited with the discoveries.

“He could run down most prey with ease over open ground. His most distinguishing feature was three large slashing claws on each hand. Unlike some theropods that have small arms (think T. rex), Banjo was different; his arms were a primary weapon.

“He’s Australia’s answer to velociraptor, but many times bigger and more terrifying.”

The bones will eventually go on display to the public. Link -via Fark

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

… Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.

Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.

This can’t possibly end well: Link