5 "Oddball" Crocs Found in Sahara Desert
A strange assortment of prehistoric crocodilyform fossils have been found in Africa. Crocodilyforms are ancient cousins of today’s alligators, crocodiles, and caimans.
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)
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Dinosaur Built (and Named) Like a Tank
Paleontologists Bill and Kris Parsons of the Buffalo Museum of Science in New York found a dinosaur skull in Montana in 1997. In the years since, they’ve excavated the rest of the skeleton of a new dinosaur called Tatankacephalus cooneyorum.
“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)
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Darwinopterus, the New Flying Reptile
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)
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Ardipithecus
Fifteen years ago, Berkeley scientist Tim White and a team of researchers from Ethiopia and America found bones of a hominid older than the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy (A. afarensis). The team collected 110 bones, enough to reconstruct the skeletons of what was unveiled today as Ardipithecus ramidus. These bones date from 4.4 million years ago! Carl Zimmer points out several ways that this prehistoric species tells us new things about the development of humans. For example, in some animal species (including apes), male canine teeth are much bigger than the female version. These are the species in which competition for females often turns violent.
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
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Did Prehistoric Britain Have a Land Navigation Network?
David Derbyshire writes in The Daily Mail that ancient Britons may have developed a sophistated land navigation system among various sites and markers. Amateur archaeologist Tom Brooks has analyzed 1,500 prehistoric sites and found a pattern:
He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles – these are triangles with two sides the same length.
This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.
For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.
Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.
Mr Brooks added: ‘The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.
At the link, you can see a map illustrating Brooks’ hypothesis.
Image by flickr user Danny Sullivan used under creative commons license.
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Oldest Human-Fashioned Fibers Discovered
In a cave in the nation of Georgia, American, Israeli, and Georgian scientists discovered the oldest human-worked fibers ever known. The flax remnants date to about 30,000 years ago:
Flax was growing wild at the time. And it turns out not only to be a source of edible grain, but of fiber. These fibers were twisted — a sure sign that the flax had been spun.
Flax fibers woven together make linen, but in this case, linen doesn’t mean crisply pressed summer suits. Bar-Yosef says the fibers they found in the cave were probably braided together, macrame style.
“You can make headgear, you can make baskets, you can make ropes and strings, and so on,” he says.
Bar-Yosef didn’t find any of those objects in the cave — that’s too much to hope for 30,000 years later. But the researchers report in Science magazine that they did find evidence that the fibers were knotted and dyed — black, gray, turquoise and even pink. That’s consistent with other artifacts that show an artistic flair among these early people.
Photo: Eliso Kvavadze/NPR
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Prehistoric Oddities
The following is a reprint
from Uncle
John's Bathroom Reader Why should dinosaurs have all the fun? Here are a few prehistoric critters that are every bit as bizarre as the strangest of the dinos: Opabinia
It might be a distant cousin of shrimp salad or it might be unrelated to anything alive today. Although it looked like something out of a science fiction movie, this weird four-inch-long animal lived in the sea that covered what is now Canada about 530 million years ago. Instead of legs, it had 14 pairs of oarlike gills used for swimming. But the real strangeness was saved for the head. It had five eyes - two pairs on stalks and another sitting in the middle of the top of the head. In front of all these eyes was a long flexible nozzle with a claw at the end. Scientists think the claw captured food and carried it to the mouth. Hallucigenia
Carpoids
Virtually all animals have some kind of symmetry - either bilateral like humans where your right hand is the mirror image of your left hand, or radial like a starfish, which looks the same no matter which arm is pointing up. But carpoids were completely asymmetrical. This distant relation of the sand dollar lived in the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere from 500 to about 350 million years ago. It looked something like a misshapen armored tadpole, with a bulging body covered with stony plates and a long, segmented tail that it used for swimming. Some scientists think that carpoids may have been the ancestors of vertebrates. Conodonts
For more than a century scientists kept finding microscopic, teethlike objects in marine rocks dating from 510 to 210 million years ago. They looked like tiny, cone-shaped teeth or combs, but there was no sign of a jaw or any other bit of skeleton associated with them. There were quite a few theories about what class of animal these conodonts belonged to, but it wasn't until about 20 years ago that a fossil of the whole animal was found. In appearance it was not spectacular. It was long and thin like a worm, but it had eyes and a low dorsal fin, and the teeth were located in the mouth. Many scientists now believe that the conodont may be one of the earliest-known vertebrates. Ostracoderms
Diplocaulus
This 3-foot (1 m) long amphibian lived in what is now Texas about 270 million years ago. In most respects it looked like a large salamander, but its head made it unique. The skull was shaped like a boomerang with two small eyes in the front corners and the wings on either side. Scientists are not sure why Diplocaulus's head is such an odd shape, but they think it was either to make the animal swim better near the bottom of the lakes and streams it lived in - or the wide head made it more difficult for predators to swallow. Lystrosaurus
Before the age of the dinosaurs, there were a lot of strange-looking reptiles, but few odder than Lystrosaurus. This 3-foot-long plant-eater had a squat body and splayed legs like a lizard, but its muzzle was shortened a bit like that of a bulldog. As if this wasn't attractive enough, from the corners of its mouth hung two long tusks. The eyes and nostrils were set high up, making some scientists think that the animal had lived the way hippos do now, but recent findings show that Lystrosaurus could also have lived in arid environments that were common about 230 million years ago. AmbulocetusHalfway between the land-dwelling ancestors of whales and the modern marine mammals, Ambulocetus lived in what is now Pakistan about 50 million years ago. This 12-foot-long animal looked a bit like a cross between an otter and an alligator. It had a large head with long jaws and pointed teeth designed for catching and holding fish like an alligator, but the body was more like that of an otter. Scientists think it swam by moving its tail up and down like a modern whale rather than from side to side like a fish. Phorusrhacos
Diprotodon
Before humans arrived in Australia about 40,000 years ago, marsupials were larger and more varied than they are today. The largest of all was the Diprotodon, which was about the size of a hippopotamus. It looked like a gigantic wombat (one of those furry, bearlike things), and it ate leaves and grass. It wasn't a fast runner, but it was too large for any of the native predators to tackle until humans came along. (We're not pointing fingers or anything, but the Diprotodon became extinct suspiciously soon after the first humans arrived. Coincidence?) Glyptodon
The most heavily armored mammal of all time has to have been the Glyptodon. About the size of a VW Beetle, this distant relation of the armadillo roamed the plains of South American until 15,000 years ago. The first humans in that part of the world encountered these strange beasts and incorporated them into their legends. Glyptodon resembled a turtle with patches of fur except that the high, rounded shell was made of many small plates of bone. It had a long tail with a ball at the end of it like the mace of a medieval knight. Moropus
When scientists first discovered the Moropus, they couldn't believe that the horselike head and body belonged with the long claws and massive feet found nearby. This 10-foot-long distant relative of the horse looked like a mixed-up bag of spare parts. The head and neck looked like a stunted giraffe, but the body was more like that of a bear. The front legs were quite a bit longer than the back legs, and all four feet were armed with long claws. Some scientists believe that Moropus fed by rearing up on its hind legs and pulling down branches so it could strip off the leaves with its long tongue. This animal lived in tropical Asia until about 12,000 years ago. Mammuthus
Everyone knows what a woolly mammoth looked like - a big hairy elephant with long, curling tusks. Everyone also knows that they died out at the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. Guess again. For one thing, the last mammoths weren't very mammoth; they were about the size of a buffalo. They lived on Wrangel Island, off the northern coast of Siberia, and survived after other mammoths became extinct. Scientists believe that the dwarf mammoths were still around about 4,000 years ago, after the pyramids were built! |
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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!
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This
appropriately named little beast bears no resemblance to any animal alive
or dead. Like Opabinia, it lived in Canada about 530 million
years ago. Hallucigenia is so bizarre that scientists are uncertain
which end is the front and which side is up. The most-accepted version
shows a wormlike body supported by seven pairs of spines. Along the top
of the body were seven long tentacles with two-pronged tips. One end had
a bulbous feature that looked a bit like a head but with no sign of eyes
or mouth. At the other end was a long tube that curved up over the "back,"
which may have been a mouth or an anus.
Some
of the earliest vertebrates were armored, jawless fish that were most
common between 430 and 370 million years ago. These fish had skeletons
made of cartilage, but their bodies were covered with plates of bone,
so it could be said that they were wearing their skeletons on the outside.
Ostracoderms could be up to 3 feet (1 m) long, but most were under a foot.
Their heads were usually covered by a semicircular shield with two small
holes for eyes. The rest of the body was surrounded by articulated plates
that allowed the animal to swim slowly by moving its tail from side to
side. These animals preferred a quiet environment like a lagoon where
they could drift along the bottom, straining edible particles out of the
mud.
About
20 million years ago, South America was an island continent with its own
unique forms of birds and mammals. Because no large mammalian predators
had evolved there, the top carnivore was a bird - Phorusrhacos.
These flightless birds stood up to 10 feet (3 m) tall and had a head the
size of that of a horse. Although they couldn't fly, they were very fast
runners. They could run down their prey, catch it with their powerful
talons, and tear it apart with their long, hooked beaks. These frightening
birds survived until about 3 million years ago, when a land bridge formed
between North and South America, allowing modern carnivores to invade
South America and give Phorusrhacos a little carnivorish competition.
(Image: Drawing of Phorusrhacos by Charles R. Knight [
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Man Made Glue from the Stone Age
A glue formula used by people in South Africa 70,000 years ago required more intelligence than archaeologists normally attribute to Stone Age men. It was made by mixing red ochre with the gum of acacia trees. It turns out that the red ochre serves more than a decorative purpose, as researchers found out when they made some of the glue themselves.
“We discovered that when we used ochre, the glue is much more robust, and the stone tool doesn’t come off the shaft,” said study team member Lyn Wadley of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.
But making the glue wasn’t easy for the ancient Africans.
It was mentally taxing work that would have required humans to account for differences in the chemistry of gum harvested from different trees and in the iron content of ochre from different sites.
“They couldn’t possibly have known about chemical pH or iron content … but they knew that certain combinations of things worked very well,” Wadley said.
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Devolve Me
Upload a picture, and see yourself turned into an much earlier version of human! From left to right, this is me as an Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo heidelbergensis. Oh, and as Homo sapiens, too. Link -via J-Walk Blog
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