Paleontology
New research by Professor Michael Benton and our own Sarda Sahney at the University of Bristol indicate in a Proceedings of the Royal Society B paper that specialized animals forming complex ecosystems, with high biodiversity, complex food webs and a variety of niches, took over 30 million years to recover from the last major extinction.
About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, a major extinction event killed over 90 per cent of life on earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were…
Dinosaurs had pregnancies as early as age 8, far before they reached their maximum adult size, a new study finds.
Researchers at Ohio University and University of California at Berkeley have found medullary bone – the same tissue that allows birds to develop eggshells – in two new dinosaur specimens: the meat-eater Allosaurus and the plant-eater Tenontosaurus. It’s also been found in Tyrannosaurus rex.
The discovery allowed researchers to pinpoint the age of these pregnant dinosaurs, which were 8, 10 and 18. That suggests that the creatures reached sexual maturity earlier than previously…
Discovery of an exceptional fossil specimen in southeastern Morocco that preserves evidence of the animal’s soft tissues has solved a paleontological puzzle about the origins of an extinct group of bizarre slug-like animals with rows of mineralized armor plates on their backs, according to a paper in Nature.
While evolution has produced great diversity in the body designs of animals, over the course of history several highly distinct groups, such as trilobites and ammonites, have become extinct. The new fossil is of an unusual creature known as a machaeridian, an invertebrate, or animal…
Research on a treasure trove of amber has yielded evidence that France once was covered by a dense tropical rainforest with trees similar to those found in the modern-day Amazon. The report is on 55-million-year-old pieces of amber from the Oise River area in northern France.
In the new study, Akino Jossang and colleagues used laboratory instruments to analyze the fossilized tree sap in an effort to link specific samples of amber to specific kinds of trees. The amber remained intact over the ages, while the trees from which it oozed disappeared. Efforts to make such connections have been…
The extinction of dinosaurs has always fascinated historians and biologists. Theories abound regarding asteroid impacts or massive volcanic flows that might have occurred around the time dinosaurs became extinct but a new book argues that the mightiest creatures the world has ever known may have been brought down by a tiny, much less dramatic force – biting, disease-carrying insects.
An important contributor to the demise of the dinosaurs, experts say, could have been the rise and evolution of insects, especially the slow-but-overwhelming threat posed by new disease carriers. And the…
Scientists since Darwin have known that whales are mammals whose ancestors walked on land. In the past 15 years, researchers led by Hans Thewissen of the Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy (NEOUCOM) have identified a series of intermediate fossils documenting whale's dramatic evolutionary transition from land to sea.
But one step was missing: The identity of the land ancestors of whales.
The African Mousedeer (also called Chevrotain), for example, is known to jump in water when in danger and move around at the bottom, but it is not closely related to whales.
The…
The remains of one of the largest meat-eating dinosaurs ever found have recently been recognized as representing a new species by a student working at the University of Bristol.
The new species is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs ever to have lived. Carcharodontosaurus iguidensis was probably 13-14 metres long, making it taller than a double-decker bus. It had a skull about 1.75 metres long and its teeth were the size of bananas.
Steve Brusatte, an MSc student the University of Bristol who identified the theropod said: “The first remains of Carcharodontosaurus were found in the 1920s…
A new genus and species of dinosaur from the Early Jurassic has been discovered in Antarctica. The massive plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived about 190 million years ago.
The recently published description of the new dinosaur is based on partial foot, leg and ankle bones found on Mt. Kirkpatrick near the Beardmore Glacier in Antarctica at an elevation of more than 13,000 feet.
“The fossils were painstakingly removed from the ice and rock using jackhammers, rock saws and chisels under extremely difficult conditions over the course of two field…
The discovery of a giant fossilised claw from an ancient sea scorpion indicates that when alive it would have been about two and a half meters long, much taller than the average man.
This find, from rocks 390 million years old, suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought.
Dr Simon Braddy from the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, co-author of an article about the find, said, ‘This is an amazing discovery. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized…
A 110 million-year-old dinosaur that had a mouth that worked like a vacuum cleaner, hundreds of tiny teeth and nearly translucent skull bones will be unveiled Thursday, Nov. 15, at the National Geographic Society.
Found in the Sahara by National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno, paleontologist and professor at the University of Chicago, the dinosaur is a plant eater known as Nigersaurus taqueti. Originally named by Sereno and his team in 1999 with only a few of its distinctive bones in hand, Nigersaurus has emerged as an anatomically bizarre dinosaur.
Skeleton of Nigersaurus…