Tag: "fossils" at biology news

Caribbean frogs started with a single, ancient voyage on a raft from South America

...e of change, which is established with the help of fossils and geologic information," explained Hedges. The study's DNA research revealed that, while many ocean dispersals may have occurred over time, only two led to the current faunas: one for the Caribbean islands and another for Central America. The s...

CT scan reveals ancient long-necked gliding reptile

...emical techniques have been unsuccessful." "The fossils sit on sheets of stone less than a quarter inch thick," says Tim M Ryan, research associate in anthropology and member of Penn State’s Center for Quantitative Imaging. "The color of the bones is the same as the color of the surrounding matrix which ...

Ice Age extinction claimed highly carnivorous Alaskan wolves

...day wolves in Alaska and throughout the world. The fossils showed a wide range of haplotypes—greater in fact than their modern counterpart—but there was no overlap with modern wolves. This was unexpected. “We thought possibly they would be related to Asian wolves instead of American wolves because North ...

Lessons from the orangutans: Upright walking may have begun in the trees

...eria for distinguishing early human, or "hominin," fossils from those of other apes. But, this distinction is complicated by recent fossil evidence that some early hominins, including Lucy ( Australopithecus afarensis ), lived in woodland environments, while even earlier forms such as Millennium Man ( Orrori...

Invasion of the island bats

...e West Indies, and this pattern is consistent with fossils found throughout the region. As the culmination in the study of several independent bat groups, this article shows that reverse colonization is a feature of the entire Caribbean bat community, encompassing groups of bats as different from each other ...

Study of protein folds offers insight into metabolic evolution

...ecture has preserved ancient structural designs as fossils of ancient biochemistries," the authors wrote. The team used data from two international compilations of genetic and proteomic information: the metabolic pathways database of the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes, and the Structural Classifi...

Despite their heft, many dinosaurs had surprisingly tiny genomes

...us extinct species' osteocytes had been. "These fossils let us sample species through evolutionary time," Edwards says, "providing genomic information that's often unavailable for long-extinct ancestors." ...

Ancient amphibians evolved a bite before migrating to dry land

...hen analyzed the same cranial junctions in several fossils -- the early amphibian Acanthostega, its fishy ancestor Eusthenopteron, and the extinct terrestrial amphibian Phonerpeton -- to determine how these bones may have moved relative to each other during feeding. By analyzing the tiny forces that the sutu...

Hofmeyr skull supports the 'Out of Africa' theory

Reliably dated fossils are critical to understanding the course of human ...rn humans in Eurasia. Until now, the lack of human fossils of appropriate antiquity from sub-Saharan Africa has meant that these competing genetic models of hu...

40,000-year-old skull shows both modern human and Neandertal traits

... years ago ?lead the team to conclude that the two fossils were the same age. These are the earliest modern human remains so far found in Europe and represent our best evidence of what the modern humans who first dispersed into Europe looked like. By comparing it with other skulls, Professor Zilhao and co...

Mystery of fossilized trees is solved

...he entire trees looked like. Two years ago, two fossils were found near Gilboa of trees which had fallen s...Cardiff University, an expert who has studied tree fossils around the world for the last 17 years. Dr Berry was able to identify the trunks as being of the gen...

Old dinosaur research leads to new honor

A lifelong obsession with fossils led to Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council grantee Robert Reisz discovering the oldest known dinosaur embryos and the oldest known reptile that stands on two legs. Now, he is being honoured for more than 35 years of research excellen...

Microfossils unravel climate history of tropical Africa

...istory of land temperatures based on the molecular fossils of soil bacteria. They applied the method to a marine sediment core taken in the outflow of the Congo River. This core contained eroded land material and microfossils from marine algae. The results show that the land environment of tropical Africa wa...

'Terror bird' arrived in North America before land bridge, study finds

... new application to revise the ages of terror bird fossils in Texas and Florida, the only places in North Ame...orth Central Florida. "We found that the Titanis fossils were 2 million years old and not 10,000 years old as had been suggested," MacFadden said. "This also...

Dig deeper to find Martian life

...that life once existed ?proteins, DNA fragments or fossils ?would be a major discovery in itself, but the Holy Grail for astrobiologists is finding a living cell that we can warm up, feed nutrients and reawaken for studying. "It just isn’t plausible that dormant life is still surviving in the near-subsur...

Good times ahead for dinosaur hunters, according to U of Penn scientist's dinosaur census

...e, where the rocks are of the right age to contain fossils dating back to the dinosaur era. At some point, paleontologists will find all the fossils that could possibly be found. Dodson and Wang's analysis also offers evidence that dinosaur populat...

Finding an answer to Darwin's Dilemma

The sudden appearance of large animal fossils more than 500 million years ago ?a problem that pe...responds with the first appearance of large animal fossils on the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland. Now for the first time, geochemical studies have determ...

Coral stress 'like never in history'

...fi. "The frequency of reef [die-off] events in the fossils is at least an order of magnitude less than it is ...ck as far as 11 000 years ago. "The sequence of fossils is like a three dimensional movie of what happened in the reefs?past," says Pandolfi. Over the ...

Tiny bones rewrite textbooks

Small but remarkable fossils found in New Zealand will prompt a major rewrite of prehistory textbooks, showing for the first time that the so-called "land of birds" was once home to mammals as well. The tiny fossilised bones - part of a jaw and a leg - belonged to a unique, mou...

New dwarf buffalo discovered by chance in the Philippines

...neer from the central Philippines, discovered some fossils in a tunnel he was excavating while exploring for ...nger. The discovery demonstrates that there are fossils to be found in the Philippines, which rarely produces fossils due to its hot, wet conditions, which ...

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