Paleontology

We can thank Mr. Spielberg and popular culture for the fact that most people think of dinosaurs when they think of fossils. The bone record is actually far less abundant that the plant record. While calcium rich bones and teeth fossilize well, they often do not get laid down in a situation that makes this possible. If you visit fossil sites from the Pacific Northwest today, particularly the Eocene sites along Chuckanut Drive, take a boo and ponder the abundance of plants and lack of visible animal life. They are far fewer animals than plants and consequently far fewer animals in…

The largest study ever conducted of DNA evidence extracted from long-dead woolly mammoths points to a rockier past for the iconic Ice Age giants than many had suspected. The last mammoths left in Siberia 50,000 to 5,000 years ago weren't natives, they report in the September 4th Current Biology. Rather, they were North Americans that had migrated in and replaced the dwindling Siberian populations. In the new study, the researchers analyzed mitochondrial DNA from 160 mammoth samples from across Holarctica (a region encompassing present day North America, Europe and Asia), representing most…

Scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum in London have announced the discovery of the oldest known fossil of a gecko, with body parts that are forever preserved in life-like form after 100 million years of being entombed in amber. Due to the remarkable preservative power of being embalmed in amber, the tiny foot of this ancient lizard still shows the tiny “lamellae,” or sticky toe hairs, that to this day give modern geckos their unusual ability to cling to surfaces or run across a ceiling. Research programs around the world have tried to mimic this bizarre…

A 75-million-year-old fossil of a pregnant turtle and a nest of fossilized eggs that were discovered in the badlands of southeastern Alberta by scientists and staff from the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology are yielding new ideas on the evolution of egg-laying and reproduction in turtles and tortoises. It is the first time the fossil of a pregnant turtle has been found and the description of this discovery was published today in the British journal Biology Letters. The mother carrying the eggs was found in 1999 by Tyrrell staff while the nest of eggs was…

Misinterpreted fragments of leg bones, teeth and brow ridges found in Palau appear to be an archaeologist's undoing, according to researchers at three institutions. They say that the so-called dwarfs of these Micronesian islands actually were modern, normal-sized hunters and gatherers. Scientists from the University of Oregon, North Carolina State University and the Australian National University refute the conclusion of Lee R. Berger and colleagues that Hobbit-like little people once lived there.(1) "One of his biggest mistakes was rushing to publish," said University of Oregon…

A famous Neolithic Iceman is dressed in clothes made from sheep and cattle hair, a new study shows. The researchers say their findings support the idea that the Iceman was a herdsman. The social and cultural background of the Iceman, dubbed Oetzi, has been the subject of much debate since his mummified remains were discovered in an Alpine glacier in 1991. Although his clothes were known to be made of animal skins, their exact origin was uncertain. This new study focuses on hair samples taken from Oetzi's coat, leggings and moccasin shoes. Oetzi was discovered in 1991 in the Italian/Austrian…

Scientists have determined that Neandertals had big mouths that they were able to open unusually wide. No great surprise given their large craniums and strong facial musculature, but what is more interesting is that we have now sequenced their DNA and determined that they did not interbreed with modern homeo sapien sapiens. Do you suppose Neanderthals died out because of some lack of evolutionary skill or perhaps their small, inbred population with a sea of genetic mutations and mouths gaped widely meant the cooler kids, the homo sapien hipsters, just wouldn't play nice, hang out…

To track atmospheric change caused by human activity, researchers have long studied a variety of materials, from tree rings to air trapped in glacial ice. A problem has been "noise" - natural variability caused by sampling and random events that affect atmospheric chemistry. Noise can make it hard to tease out trends from the data. Joseph Bump, a PhD candidate in forest science at Michigan Tech, and his colleagues speculated that those trends would be picked up by top predators as well as by trees. And they further suspected that measurements from predators would show much less noise. "Wolves…

Research led by UK and Australian scientists sheds new light on the role that our ancestors played in the extinction of Australia's prehistoric animals. The study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides the first evidence that Tasmania's giant kangaroos and marsupial 'rhinos' and 'leopards' were still roaming the island when humans first arrived. The findings suggest that the mass extinction of Tasmania's large prehistoric animals was the result of human hunting, and not climate change as previously believed. Scientists have long argued over the reasons behind the…

Paleontologists in 2005 hailed research that apparently showed that soft, pliable tissues had been recovered from dissolved dinosaur bones, a major finding that would substantially widen the known range of preserved biomolecules. But new research challenges that finding and suggests that the supposed recovered dinosaur tissue is in reality biofilm – or slime. The original research, published in Science magazine, claimed the discovery of blood vessels and what appeared to be entire cells inside fossil bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex. The scientists had dissolved the bone in acid, leaving behind…