Couch Command | There Are Four Hosts | Johnny Caps Flashback | Forum | News | KDrama
Register
Login

Paleontology

Ankle Evidence Shows Earth’s Earliest Primates Were Tree-Dwellers

Ankle Evidence Shows Earth’s Earliest Primates Were Tree-Dwellers

, , 0

If you went back to visit your earliest known primate ancestors, you’d find them in the trees. New fossil evidence shows Purgatorius, a small, squirrel-like insect and fruit-eating mammal, was a tree-dweller. Paleontologists analyzed 65 million-year-old fossil ankle bones found in Northeastern Montana to clear up questions about the habitat of Purgatorius, which started kicking around shortly after non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. “The textbook that I am currently using in my biological anthropology courses still has an illustration of Purgatorius walking on the ground. Hopefully this study will change what students are learning about earliest primate evolution and will place Purgatorius in the trees where it rightfully belongs,” said Stephen Chester, the paper’s lead author, an assistant professor at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. Before the ankle bones were found in Montana, scientists only had the creature’s teeth and jaws to work with. But the structure of the bones makes it clear that Purgatorius headed for the trees. “The ankle bones have diagnostic features for mobility that are

Scientists Reconstruct Cute Mesozoic Critter

Scientists Reconstruct Cute Mesozoic Critter

, , , 0

Just look at that little guy. Doesn’t he look like he’d give Bill Murray a hard time in a prehistoric Caddyshack prequel? A well-preserved Mesozoic fossil from Madagascar and detailed analysis has given scientists a new perspective on the cute varmint, Vintana sertichi. Vintana, a member of an extinct group of mammals, gondwanatherians, didn’t fit the stereotypical mold of the tiny mouse-like critters scurrying under the feet of thunder lizards we imagine when we think of the early mammals that lived alongside the dinosaurs. Instead, according to the findings of the scientists, Vintana was a “badger-sized, herbivorous animal that was agile and active, with keen senses of smell, vision, and hearing.” It shows there was more diversity among Mesozoic animals than commonly thought. Earlier gondwantherian finds had been limited to a few teeth and fragments, so the mammal group was poorly understood, but that changed with the discovery of the fossilized skull of the Vintana, which was nearly intact after scientists meticulously removed it from a block of sediment. Researchers

Largest Predatory Dinosaur Ever Discovered Hunted in Ancient Rivers

Largest Predatory Dinosaur Ever Discovered Hunted in Ancient Rivers

, , , , 0

Scientists have revealed what they believe to be the first dinosaur ever discovered to hunt in the water, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Spinosaurus is not only the first semi-aquatic dinosaur, at 50 feet long it’s the largest predatory dinosaur ever found, at least least nine feet longer than the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen. Scientist believe the great Cretaceous-era predator haunted lush ancient rivers that 95 million years later are now dry Sahara desert, seeking fish and making it a very, very risky move to go into the water. The first Spinosaurus remains were found more than 100 years ago, but it took recent work by an international team of paleontologists to put together the dinosaur’s aquatic connections. The original Spinosaurus find was made by German paleontologist Ernst Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach  in the Egyptian Sahara. It was destroyed by the bombing of Munich during World War II, but the scientists were able to use photos, sketches and descriptions of it to support their research. Using this and partial specimens stored in museums and new fossils found in the Morrocan Sahara, they were able to create

Evolutionary Misfit Finds a Home

Evolutionary Misfit Finds a Home

, , , , , 0

I like to imagine Hallucigenia, a tiny, um, thing-like prehistoric animal that scientists first found baffling fossils of in the 1970s, singing a jaunty personalized version of “We’re a Couple of Misfits” from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as it went about its underwater day 505 million years ago during the Cambrian Explosion. Why am I such a misfit? I am not just a nit wit! I’m an adorable something Why don’t I fit in? I imagine this because I am much too prone to whimsy. But also because try as they might, scientists could not place this evolutionary weirdo anywhere that made sense with modern animal groups. But now Hallucigenia has found a home, and is a misfit no more. Scientists at the University of Cambridge have found a link between the ocean-dwelling Hallucigenia and modern velvet worms, a small group of animals that live in tropical rain forests. Hallucigenia was discovered in Burgess Shale in Canada’s Rocky Mountains and was so named because it looked weird and people did a

Fossil Clues Point to Theory That All Dinosaurs Were Feathered

Fossil Clues Point to Theory That All Dinosaurs Were Feathered

, , , 0

  The scaly, green, slavering, purely reptilian dinosaur had a good run. Like Pluto as a planet, it’s being replaced by a new scientific understanding, and we just might have to admit that our image of dinosaurs as scaly monsters, as metal as it was, was wrong. Recent scientific findings from Russia suggest that it’s possible that not just some, but all, dinosaurs had feathers, as scientist have found the first plant-eating dinosaur fossils with visible feathers, according to a press release about the find. The newly found dinosaur was named Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus because it was discovered at a place called Kulinda near the Olov River in Siberia.  The small, about a meter long, dinosaur showed signs of being adapted to plant-eating and appears to have had “complex compound feathers” around its arms and legs. This is a big deal because the dinosaurs that have been found so far with feathers have been theropods, meat eaters that were the direct ancestors of birds. It’s no huge surprise that Big Bird’s exponentially great-grandad had

See How An Ancient Arachnid Crawled

See How An Ancient Arachnid Crawled

, , 0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9ms04cDH50 I’ve never understood the phobia about spiders. I know people who live in mortal fear of them, but to me they’re just friendly little visitors to my home, being neighborly and eating the annoying bugs and flies. So, depending on how you come down on spiders, this video either comes with an enthusiastic encouragement or a trigger warning. It shows how a 410 million-year-old spiderish creature called a trigonotarbid arachnid might have crawled about. Researchers from The University of Manchester and the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin studied fossils from the Natural History Museum in London to work out the range of motion of the trigonotarbid’s limbs and create the computer animation. The trigonotarbid was one of the first land predators. The fact that early arachnids were among the first things to walk the earth and go, “Hey, I should kill things here!” doesn’t help their rep, I know. “When it comes to early life on land, long before our ancestors came out of the sea, these early arachnids were top

Scientists Find 17-Million-Year-Old Sperm in Fossilized Shrimp

Scientists Find 17-Million-Year-Old Sperm in Fossilized Shrimp

, , , , 0

I guess everything is bigger, stranger and scarier in Australia. Australian scientists have found the world’s oldest fossilized sperm in a fossil dug up in Northern Queensland. It’s very well preserved for being 17 million years old and, relative to the size of the animal that produced it, pretty darned impressive. The sperm is only a couple of millimeters long, but it’s as long as the freshwater shrimp, called an ostracod, that it came from. So eww. ”99.9 per cent of organisms who have sperm have, relative to their body size, small sperm [because] you’ve got to tuck them away in a little jiblet somewhere in your body,” said palaeontologist Michael Archer, who along with three other researchers dug up the fossil where the sperm was found all the way back in 1988. The sperm was recently found by German researcher Renate Matzke-Karasz, who used a synchrotron, which is a kind of particle accelerator, to scan the inside of the fossilized shrimp and discovered that many of its soft tissues “including