Paleontology

A newly constructed climate record from the Triassic-Jurassic boundary explains how the dinosaurs rose to prominence as the Triassic Period ended, says an international team of geologists and paleobiologists writing in PNAS. Researchers reconstructed the climate from the Triassic-Jurassic boundary by combining fossil evidence of plant and animal extinctions with the carbon signature found in the wax of ancient leaves and wood found in lake sediments intermixed with basalts. The effort revealed strong support for the hypothesis that massive, widespread volcanic eruptions led to a spike in…

Paleontologists have discovered a new raptor species in Inner Mongolia.  The exceptionally well preserved dinosaur, named Linheraptor exquisitus, is the first near complete skeleton of its kind to be found in the Gobi desert since 1972, and will help scientists work out the appearance of other closely related dinosaur species. A study documenting the find was published today in Zootaxa. Linheraptor is in the Dromaeosauridae family of the carnivorous theropod dinosaurs and lived during the Late Cretaceous period. In addition to Linheraptor and Velociraptor, theropod dinosaurs include…

Palaeontologists have discovered evidence of how an extinct shark attacked its prey, reconstructing a killing that took place 4 million years ago. Such fossil evidence of behavior is incredibly rare, but by careful, forensic-style analysis of bite marks on an otherwise well-preserved dolphin skeleton, the research team say they have reconstructed the events that led to the death of the dolphin, and likely determined the identity of the killer: a 4 m shark called Cosmopolitodus hastalis. The evidence, published in Palaeontology, comes from the fossilized skeleton of a 2.8 m long dolphin (…

A new genus and species of carnivorous amphibian from western Pennsylvania, Fedexia striegeli, provides the earliest widespread evidence of terrestrial Vertebrates, say researchers from Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The fossil skull, found in 2004 near Pittsburgh International Airport, was recovered from rocks deposited approximately 300 million years ago during the Late Pennsylvanian Period.  The rocks where Fedexia was found are nearly 20 million years older than the localities of its fossil relatives, suggesting that the expansion and diversification of this group occurred much…

They Might Be Giants serve up another slice of power pop for kids with "I am a Paleontologist". One of the better videos in their science series.

An asteroid colliding with Earth was responsible for the Cretaceous–Tertiary mass extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and more than half of species on Earth, according to a new review published in Science. Scientists have previously argued about whether the extinction was caused by the asteroid or by volcanic activity in the Deccan Traps in India, where there were a series of super volcanic eruptions that lasted approximately 1.5 million years. These eruptions spewed 1,100,000 km3 of basalt lava across the Deccan Traps, which would have been enough to fill the Black Sea twice, and were…

A newly discovered species that shared many characteristics with dinosaurs but fell just outside of the dinosaur family lived 10 million years earlier than the oldest known dinosaurs. Researchers writing in Nature say the discovery of  Asilisaurus kongwe means that dinosaurs and their close relatives such as pterosaurs (flying reptiles) might have also lived much earlier than previously thought. The research also suggests that at least three times in the evolution of dinosaurs and their closest relatives, meat-eating animals evolved into animals with diets that included plants. These…

A 3.5-metre-long snake that lived 67 million years ago made a habit of eating baby sauropods as they first scrambled out of their eggs, say paleontologists writing in PLoS Biology. The conclusion is based on the discovery in India of a nearly complete fossilized skeleton of the primitive snake Sanajeh indicus coiled inside a dinosaur nest. The fossils were first found in 1987 by dinosaur egg expert Dhananjay Mohabey from the Geological Survey of India, in rocks of the Lameta Formation in Gujarat, a state in western India known for its rich fossil record of dinosaurs and their eggs.…

A team of paleontologists has discovered a new dinosaur species which belongs to the  same group of gigantic, long-necked, long-tailed, four-legged, plant-eating sauropods as Brachiosaurus. The new species has been dubbed 'Abydosaurus', and its discovery will be detailed in an upcoming issue of Naturwissenshaften. The fossils were excavated from the Cedar Mountain Formation in Dinosaur National Monument near Vernal, Utah. The team recovered four heads – two still fully intact – from a quarry in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah. Complete skulls have been recovered for only eight…

During the middle Eocene, 45-50 m.y.a., a number of freshwater lakes appeared in an arc extending from Smithers, through the modern Cariboo, to Kamloops, the Nicola Valley, Princeton, and Republic, WA. The lakes likely formed after a period of faulting produced a number of basins, called grabens into which water collected. The faulting was followed by a time of volcanism that produced periodic falls of fine-grained ash. The ash washed into the lakes and because of its texture, and possibly because of low water oxygen levels on the bottoms that slowed decay, plant, invertebrate, and…