Ancient fossils shed light on anatomical changes accompanying evolution of first land vertebrates
Durham, NC -- Cartoon depictions of the first animals to emerge from the ocean and walk on land often show a simple fish with feet, venturing from water to land. But according to Jennifer Clack, a paleontologist at the University of Cambridge who has studied the fossils of these extinct creatures ...Biologists Question Animal Brain Size Theory
...elative to itself were influenced by more than just sociality within the species. "This is a sophisticated and powerful analysis that integrates fossils with extant species of carnivores," Flynn, dean of the Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History, said in a museum news...Human Ancestors Put Best Foot Forward 1.5M Years Ago
... fossils thought to be oldest evidence to date of an essentially modern foot THURSDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Anthropologists have uncovered a...Fossils Push Back Bipedalism to 6 Million Years Ago
... the overall shape profile of the bone really closely resembles early human fossils from about three to two million years ago." Those fossils -- of hominins such as Australopithecus (such as the famous "Lucy"), and ...Good luck indeed: 53 million-year-old rabbit's foot bones found
...cteristics to previously unreported Chinese rabbit fossils that date to the Middle Eocene epoch, about 48 mil...urements to see how they compared with the Chinese fossils as well as living rabbits and pikas. They found that although the Indian fossils resemble pikas in some primitive features, they lo...ANSYS Sponsors Dinosaurs Exhibit at Carnegie Museum of Natural History
...re able to create something truly unique, educational and inspiring. Everyone at the museum is proud that this world-class collection of real dinosaur fossils is now presented to the public in the most accurate and most inspirational exhibit." Of the 19 free-standing dinosaur skeletons on exhibit in Dinosa...Our Ancestors Possessed Much Smaller Brains Than It was Thought
...euxis and subjected it to micro CT scanning to calculate the approximate dimensions of the brain encased inside the cranium. Based on previous fossils collected at the same dig site in a quarry outside Cairo, scientists had hypothesized that this early monkey already would have had a relatively large...Protein Folds Research Offers Insight into Metabolic Evolution
...they looked at proteins in more than 200 species) were also the most ancient. Protein architecture has preserved ancient structural designs as fossils of ancient biochemistries, the authors wrote. The team used data from two international collections of genetic and proteomic information: the ...Study Focus on Environmental Hazards Posed by IT Scraps
...functions," recommends Mona Finder from Dena. This might turn the monitor off when the computer is not in use, for example. Animated screen savers are fossils from an earlier age of computing, she notes. "They just tend to use up energy, and they don't even save the screen." It's difficult to put a fir...Ladakh was a Coastal Region Millions of Years Ago
...ts scouring the icy heights of Jammu and Kashmir came across a set of plant fossils near Tsokar in the Eastern Ladakh region and say it is proof of the existence of a coastal environment in the region. "The fossils belong to the middle-late Eocene period, anywhere between 45-33 million yea...Dinosaur fossils fit perfectly into the evolutionary tree of life
A recent study by researchers at the University of Bath and London's Natural History Museum has found that scientists' knowledge of the evolution of dinosaurs is remarkably complete. Evolutionary biologists use two ways to study the evolution of prehistoric plants and animals: firstly they use...'Hobbit' fossils represent a new species, concludes University of Minnesota anthropologist
University of Minnesota anthropology professor Kieran McNulty (along with colleague Karen Baab of Stony Brook University in New York) has made an important contribution toward solving one of the greatest paleoanthropological mysteries in recent history -- that fossilized skeletons resembling a myt...Rare Antarctic fossils reveal extinction of tundra before full polar climate arrived
(Boston) An international research team in Antarctica led by David Marchant, an associate professor of earth sciences at Boston University, has reported the discovery of exceptionally well-preserved freshwater fossils including mosses, microscopic one-celled algae, known as diatoms, small fresh wa...Antarctic fossils paint a picture of a much warmer continent
National Science Foundation-funded scientists working in an ice-free region of Antarctica have discovered the last traces of tundra--in the form of fossilized plants and insects--on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began a relentless drop millions of years ago. An ...Living fossils have long- and short-term memory
Nautiloids are the sole surviving family of externally-shelled cephalopods that thrived in the tropical oceans 450150 million years ago. However, in the intervening years their modern soft bodied relatives dumped the shell and developed complex central nervous systems; which makes Nautilus ideally...Oldest Australian crayfish fossils provide missing evolutionary link
Crayfish body fossils and burrows discovered in Victoria, Australia, have provided the first physical evidence that crayfish existed on the continent as far back as the Mesozoic Era, says Emory University paleontologist Anthony Martin, who headed up a study on the finds. "Studying the fossil bu...Rodent fossils allows to determine climate of the Iberian Peninsula 6 million years ago
This release is available in Spanish . How did the rodents which inhabited the south of the Iberian Peninsula live six million years ago" The researcher of the UGR Raef Minwer-Barakat has attempted to answer this question through his doctoral thesis "Rodents and insectivorous of Upper T...Google Earth aids discovery of early African mammal fossils
ANN ARBOR, Mich.---A limestone countertop, a practiced eye and Google Earth all played roles in the discovery of a trove of fossils that may shed light on the origins of African wildlife. The circuitous and serendipitous story, featuring University of Michigan paleontologists Philip Gingerich, ...Oldest animal fossils may have been bacteria
The oldest-known animal eggs and embryos, whose first pictures made the cover of Nature in 1998, were so small they looked like bugs ?which, it now appears, they may have been. This week, a study in the same prestigious journal presents evidence for reinterpreting the 600 million-year-old fossils...Evidence of Ancient Hot Springs on Mars Detailed in Astrobiology Journal
...ed the hot springs over a wide range of spatial scales. The potential to find key evidence indicative of life--biofabrics, microbial remains, chemical fossils in minerals--is high when sedimentary deposits form from hydrothermal fluids. Hot spring fluids are typically laden with dissolved mineral ions that,...