Free Republic

When researchers sequenced the extinct predator’s genome, they found it wasn’t a wolf at all but instead a distinct lineage that split off from the rest of the canines some 5.7 million years ago, reports James Gorman for the New York Times. To reveal the dire wolf’s true evolutionary identity, researchers extracted DNA from five fossils between 13,000 and 50,000 years old and sequenced their genomes. The team ultimately recovered around a quarter of the nuclear genome and a full complement of mitochondrial DNA from the samples... Though the bones of the dire wolf are so similar to today’s gray...

Paleontologists will tell you that field work is a lot like fishing. Nothing happens for long periods of time. But you can’t catch anything if you don’t have your line in the water. In San Diego, they’ve had their line in the water. Again. It was a place where early camels roamed, and prehistoric hoofed mammals, and probably a carnivore or two. And where volcanoes erupted. The discovery in June joins a roster of significant unearthings during construction projects in San Diego County — mastodons, dire wolves, sea cows, giant sloths, armored dinosaurs — that are painting a fuller picture...

Recent scientific findings date their arrival earlier than ever thought, sparking hot debate among archaeologists For much of its length, the slow-moving Aucilla River in northern Florida flows underground, tunneling through bedrock limestone. But here and there it surfaces, and preserved in those inky ponds lie secrets of the first Americans.For years adventurous divers had hunted fossils and artifacts in the sinkholes of the Aucilla about an hour east of Tallahassee. They found stone arrowheads and the bones of extinct mammals such as mammoth, mastodon and the American ice age horse.Then, in the 1980s, archaeologists from the Florida Museum of...