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When Paul C. Sereno went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Sahara, his career took a sharp turn from paleontology to archaeology. The expedition found what has proved to be the largest known graveyard of Stone Age people who lived there when the desert was green. The first traces of pottery, stone tools and human skeletons were discovered eight years ago at a site in the southern Sahara, in Niger. After preliminary research, Dr. Sereno, a University of Chicago scientist who had previously uncovered remains of the dinosaur Nigersaurus there, organized an international team of archaeologists to investigate what had...

Story via AP, so follow link to read. The fossil field formally known as the Pig Wallow Site at Badlands National Park will close for good at the end of this summer, 15 years after student paleontologists started unearthing prehistoric remains. "The main research of the site is to better understand how fossils are preserved and how bones accumulate in a particular setting. The main story also describes some of the fossil finds; gives the location and much more.

Figure of the fossil ostracod from the Dry Valleys. The specimen is less than 1 mm long, but preserves an array of soft tissues including legs and mouth parts. A new fossil discovery- the first of its kind from the whole of the Antarctic continent- provides scientists with new evidence to support the theory that the polar region was once much warmer. The discovery by an international team of scientists is published today (**Embargoed until 00.01 BST Wednesday 23 July**) in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It involved researchers from the University of Leicester, North Dakota State University,...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Some odd-looking fish fossils discovered in the bowels of several European museums may help solve a lingering question about evolutionary theory, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The 50 million-year-old fossils -- which have one eye near the top of their heads -- help explain how flatfish such as flounder, sole and halibut developed the strange but useful trait of having both eyes on one side. For flatfish, which lie on their sides at the bottom of the sea, this arrangement gives them the use of two watchful eyes. But the trait has posed a problem for evolutionary...

Cat-sized reptiles once roamed what is now the icebox of Antarctica, snuggling up in burrows and peeping above ground to snag plant roots and insects. The evidence for this scenario comes from preserved burrow casts discovered in the Transantarctic Mountains, which extend 3,000 miles (4,800 km) across the polar continent and contain layers of rock dating back 400 million years. "We've got good evidence that these burrows were made by land-dwelling animals rather than crayfish," said lead researcher Christian Sidor, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Washington and curator at UW's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Ancient...

The first-ever chimpanzee fossils were recently discovered in an area previously thought to be unsuitable for chimps. Fossils from human ancestors were also found nearby. Although researchers have only found a few chimp teeth, the discovery could cause a shake-up in the theories of human evolution. “We know today if you go to western and central Africa that humans and chimps live in similar and neighboring environments,” said Nina Jablonski, an anthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences. “This is the first evidence in the fossil record that they coexisted in the same place in the past.” It had previously...

CHICAGO (AFP) - French fossil hunters have pinned down the age of Toumai, which they contend is the remains of the earliest human ever found, at between 6.8 and 7.2 million years old. The fossil was discovered in the Chadian desert in 2001 and an intense debate ensued over whether the nearly complete cranium, pieces of jawbone and teeth belonged to one of our earliest ancestors. Critics said that Toumai's cranium was too squashed to be that of a hominid -- it did not have the brain capacity that gives humans primacy -- and its small size indicated a creature...

It's been called the world's single greatest assemblage of primeval fossils - an accidental Canadian treasure that scientists literally stumbled upon 100 years ago in B.C.'s Rocky Mountains. The Burgess Shale fossil site in present-day Yoho National Park is a one-of-a-kind, 530-million-year-old time capsule containing the stunningly well-preserved remains of an entire undersea ecosystem from a crucial phase in the history of life - a lost world filled with dozens of bizarre creatures destined to become evolution's losers, but also with a primitive ancestor of the human race itself. Now, a team of British and Canadian scientists has solved the...

AYIA NAPA, Cyprus - An abattoir used by early Cypriots, a place where animals went to die, or a shelter that ultimately proved a death trap? Cypriot and Greek scientists are studying a collapsed cave filled with the fossilized remains of extinct dwarf hippopotamuses — descendants of hippos believed to have reached the island a quarter-million years ago. Paleontologists have unearthed an estimated 80 dwarf hippos in recent digs at the site just outside the resort of Ayia Napa on the island's southeastern coast. Hundreds more may lie beneath an exposed layer of jumbled fossils. Scientists hope the fossil haul,...

New Haven, Conn. — The gigantic fossil claw of an 390 million-year-old sea scorpion, recently found in Germany, shows that ancient arthropods — spiders, insects, crabs and the like — were surprisingly larger than their modern-day counterparts. “Imagine an eight-foot-long scorpion,” said O. Erik Tetlie, postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale, and an author of the report online in Royal Society Biology Letters. “The claw itself is a foot-and-a-half long — indicating that these ancient arthropods were much larger than previous estimates — and certainly the largest seen to date.” Colleague and co-author Markus Poschmann...

ARCHAEOLOGY: New human fossils found in Georgia, north of Africa, have some rethinking migration of early man. DMANISI, Georgia - The forested bluff that overlooks this sleepy Georgian hamlet seems an unlikely portal into the mysteries surrounding the dawn of man. Think human evolution, and one conjures up the wind-swept savannas and badlands of east Africa's Great Rift Valley. Georgians may claim their ancestors made Georgia the cradle of wine 8,000 years ago, but the cradle of mankind lies 3,300 miles away, at Tanzania's famed Olduvai Gorge. But it is here in the verdant uplands of southern Georgia that David...

Dinosaur Deaths Outsourced to India? Boulder, CO, USA - A series of monumental volcanic eruptions in India may have killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, not a meteor impact in the Gulf of Mexico. The eruptions, which created the gigantic Deccan Traps lava beds of India, are now the prime suspect in the most famous and persistent paleontological murder mystery, say scientists who have conducted a slew of new investigations honing down eruption timing. "It's the first time we can directly link the main phase of the Deccan Traps to the mass extinction," said Princeton University paleontologist Gerta Keller....

Classic Rockers Reprise 'No Nukes' Initiative Browne, Nash, Raitt Urge Congress To Halt Loans For New PlantsPOSTED: 4:22 pm EDT October 23, 2007 WASHINGTON -- Rock musicians Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash are putting a new millennium twist on their 1970s anti-nuclear message, urging Congress not to approve federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants. "Thirty years ago, we felt that this monster was dead," Nash said. "It's trying to raise its ugly head." Nearly three decades ago, the three were prominent in the anti-nuke movement, helping organize the "No Nukes" concerts at Madison Square Garden that...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — The skeleton of what is believed to be a new dinosaur species — a 105-foot plant-eater that is among the largest dinosaurs ever found — has been uncovered in Argentina, scientists said Monday.Standing alongside a replica of a neck vertebra more than 3 feet high, scientists from Argentina and Brazil said the find was remarkable because they have recovered the most complete skeletons one of one of these "giants" found so far.They said the Patagonian dinosaur appears to represent a previously unknown species of Titanosaur because of the unique structure of its neck. They...

Many people are convinced that human evolution is a fact. Often they will cite the existence of hominids in the fossil record as evidence for their conviction. These creatures presumably represent evolutionary intermediates between an ape-like creature and modern humans. The standard evolutionary model for human origins views Homo habilis as the first member of our genus (Homo). This hominid initially appears in the fossil record about 2.6 million years ago (mya) and seemingly gives rise directly to Homo erectus around 1.9 mya. The direct transformation of H. habilis into H. erectus appeared to gain support from the recovery of...

Surprising research based on two African fossils suggests our family tree is more like a wayward bush with stubby branches, challenging what had been common thinking on how early humans evolved. The discovery by Meave Leakey, a member of a famous family of paleontologists, shows that two species of early human ancestors lived at the same time in Kenya. That pokes holes in the chief theory of man's early evolution — that one of those species evolved from the other. And it further discredits that iconic illustration of human evolution that begins with a knuckle-dragging ape and ends with a...

Two hominid fossils discovered in Kenya are challenging a long-held view of human evolution. The broken upper jaw-bone and intact skull from humanlike creatures, or hominids, are described in Nature. Previously, the hominid Homo habilis was thought to have evolved into the more advanced Homo erectus, which evolved into us. Now, habilis and erectus are now thought to be sister species that overlapped in time. The new fossil evidence reveals an overlap of about 500,000 years during which Homo habilis and Homo erectus must have co-existed in the Turkana basin area, the region of East Africa where the fossils were...

Ancient human fossils show women much smaller Thu Aug 9, 2007 10:18AM EDT NAIROBI (Reuters) - Homo erectus, long viewed as a crucial evolutionary link between modern humans and their tree-dwelling ancestors, may have been more ape-like than previously thought, scientists unveiling new-found fossils said on Thursday. Revealing an ancient skull and a jawbone from two early branches of the human family tree -- Homo erectus and Homo habilis -- a team of Kenyan scientists said they were surprised to find that early female hominids were much smaller than males. The skull was the first discovery of a female Homo...

Kenyan Fossils May Add New Branch to Human Family Tree John Roach for National Geographic News August 8, 2007 A pair of fossils recently discovered in Kenya is challenging the straight-line story of human evolution. Traditional evolutionary theories of the genus Homo suggest a successive progression: Homo habilis gave rise to Homo erectus, which then begat modern humans, Homo sapiens. H. erectus is commonly seen as the most similar ancestor to modern humans, differing mostly by having a brain about three-quarters the size. But the newly found upper jawbone and skull, which come from two separate skeletons, suggest that H....

Ethiopia unveils new find of ancient fossils Tue Jul 10, 2007 12:13PM EDT ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopian scientists said on Tuesday they have discovered hominid fossil fragments dating from between 3.5 million and 3.8 million years ago in what could fill a crucial gap in the understanding of human evolution. Ethiopian archaeologist Yohannes Haile Selassie said the find included several complete jaws and one partial skeleton and were unearthed in the Afar desert at Woranso-Mille, near where the famous fossil skeleton known as Lucy was found in 1974. "This is a major finding that could fill a gap in...

Scientists exploring a mine have uncovered a natural Sistine chapel showing not religious paintings, but incredibly well preserved images of sprawling tree trunks and fallen leaves that once breathed life into an ancient rainforest. Replete with a diverse mix of extinct plants, the 300-million-year-old fossilized forest is revealing clues about the ecology of Earth’s first rainforests . The discovery and details of the forest are published in the May issue of the journal Geology. “We’re looking at one instance in time over a large area. It’s literally a snapshot in time of a multiple square mile area,” said study team...

PARIS (AFP) - Caves in the Sun-scorched, treeless wilderness of southern Australia's Nullarbor plain have revealed one of the world's most remarkable collections of fossils, including species of now-extinct kangaroos that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. The three Thylacoleo caves, located about 100 kilometers (60 miles) from the coast, were uncovered by potholers in 2002. The find "is without precedent in Australia. Several new and previously incompletely known species are represented by whole skeletons," enthuse a team of researchers, reporting on the treasure trove in Thursday's issue of Nature. The fossils date back to the Middle Pleistocene era,...

Two aging incumbents thought to be likely retirement candidates -- US Senators Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Pete Domenici (R-NM) -- announced Thursday they will both seek re-election in 2008. Stevens, a seven-term incumbent, will be 84 in 2008. Domenici, a six-term incumbent, will be 76 in 2008...

Link Only: Fossils unearth big debate

Bending the Branches October 18, 2006 A new study of human fossils asks, what if we are the odd ones? (Washington University, St. Louis) Most people think of humans as the top, the apex of the family tree. But new research suggests this quintessentially human infatuation with ourselves may have impaired our judgment. Erik Trinkaus, a paleontologist and Neandertal expert at Washington University in St. Louis, believes that modern human features are unusual enough, compared with ancestral members of the genus Homo, to make us a side branch of the family tree. Neanderthals have generally been seen as evolutionary outcasts,...

When scientists found 18,000-year-old bones of a small, humanlike creature on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, they concluded that the bones represented a new species in the human family tree that they named Homo floresiensis. Their interpretation was widely accepted by the scientific community and heralded by the popular press around the world. Because of its very short stature, H. floresiensis was soon dubbed the "Hobbit." But now, a new research has comprehensively and convincingly rubbished the case that the small skull represent a new species of hominid, as was claimed in a study published which was published...

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopian scientists unveiled on Wednesday a 3.3 million-year-old fossil of a girl, which they believe is the most complete skeleton ever found. The fossil including an entire skull, torso, shoulder blade and various limbs was discovered at Dikaka, some 400 kms northeast of the capital Addis Ababa near the Awash river in the Rift Valley. "The finding is the most complete hominid skeleton ever found in the world," Zeresenay Alemseged, head of the Paleoanthropological Research Team, told a news conference. He said the fossil was older than the 3.2 million year old remains of "Lucy" discovered...

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region. The female bones are from the species Australopithecus afarensis , which is popularly known from the adult skeleton nicknamed "Lucy". Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature. They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor. The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones. "The Dikika fossil is now revealing many secrets about...

Link Only: Evolution Attack Goes Global

Think you've seen all there is to see of the dinosaurs? Not so fast: a new statistical study by Drs. Steven C. Wang and Peter Dodson of Swarthmore College has revealed that 71% of dinosaur genera on earth still remain to be discovered. That's good news for paleontologists and amateur dinosaur enthusiasts. But it's also good news for Richard Webber, a New York sculptor who has carved out a professional niche reconstructing fossilized remains. Webber worked on the renovation of the American Museum of Natural History's fossil hall in the mid-90s, where he built the Indricotherium, the world's largest land...

Sydney: An Australian fossil find may mean living creatures left the world's oceans for the land much earlier than once thought, rewriting a small part of mankind's evolution. A study of rocks collected near Buchan, in Victoria state's East Gippsland, has yielded a lung fish fossil more than 20 million years older than earlier finds, Macquarie University researcher Zarena Johanson said yesterday. Her colleague, Prof John Talent, who found the rocks, said the fossilised lung fish - or coelacanth - sets back the timeline for when marine animals made their first excursions on to land. "It seems from experimental data...

Link only to "Great Falls Tribune"

The skeletal remains found in a cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia, reported in 2004, do not represent a new species as then claimed, but some of the ancestors of modern human pygmies who live on the island today, according to an international scientific team. The researchers also demonstrate that the fairly complete skeleton designated LB1 is microcephalic, while other remains excavated from the site share LB1's small stature but show no evidence of microcephaly, since no other brain cases are known. Microcephaly is a condition in which the head and brain are much smaller than average for the...

PETERSBURG, Ky. - Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve. That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that's the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky. Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago. "If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that's our presupposition or axiom, and we...

Scientists have extracted intact bone marrow from the fossilized remains of 10-million-year-old frogs and salamanders. The finding, detailed in the August issue of the journal Geology, is the first case of fossilized bone marrow ever to be discovered and only the second report of fossilized soft tissue. In June of 2005, scientists announced they had found preserved red blood cells from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone. "It pushes back the boundary for how far [soft tissue] fossilization can go," said study leader Maria McNamara of University College Dublin in Ireland. Why it matters Preserved soft tissue could provide insight into...

UK scientists have traced the history of wildfires by studying lumps of ancient charcoal from around the world. The fossils show the incidence of fires through time is closely related to the level of atmospheric oxygen. Andrew Scott and Ian Glasspool say huge swathes of the planet were ablaze when concentrations of the gas peaked some 275 million years ago. Their research is published in the US scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People might think the charcoal they pull out of a bonfire is just rubbish; but look at it under a microscope and you see...

SYDNEY, Australia — Before there were cuddly koalas, hoards of flesh-eating kangaroos, "demon ducks," and marsupial lions roamed Australia's Outback, according to recent fossil discoveries by paleontologists. A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales working in the eastern state of Queensland made the discoveries in three new fossil deposits during a recent two-week dig. Many of the fossils are older than 24 million years; one of the deposits is thought to contain fossils up to 500 million years old, according to Prof. Mike Archer, the university's dean of science. A saber-toothed kangaroo and a giant 10-foot-tall,...

SYDNEY (July 12) - Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian paleontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom." A University of New South Wales team said the fearsome fossils were among 20 previously unknown species uncovered at a site in northwest Queensland state. Professor Michael Archer said on Wednesday the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolf-like fangs were found as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo. "Because they didn't hop, these were...

SYDNEY, Australia - Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. Paleontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom." A University of New South Wales team said the fearsome fossils were among 20 previously unknown species uncovered at a site in Australia's northwest Queensland state. Professor Michael Archer said Wednesday that the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolflike fangs were found, as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo. "Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big,...

Of the many mysteries surrounding the life history of dinosaurs, one of the more enduring is how such gigantic organisms--some reaching 42 feet tall and weighing 90 tons--regulated their body temperature. In a new study published in PLoS Biology, James Gillooly, Andrew Allen, and Eric Charnov revisit--and resolve--this debate. Some scientists had assumed that dinosaurs, which evolved from reptiles, were cold blooded (ectotherms), whereas others thought that dinosaurs, like mammals and birds, might have been warm blooded (endotherms). Still others argued that while most dinosaurs had a metabolism similar to contemporary reptiles, the large dinosaurs managed a higher, more-constant body...

Scientists went to work digging for fossils at La Brea Tar Pits, digging the tooth of a 5-foot (1.5-meter) dire wolf and the toe of a sabertooth tiger from the sticky prehistoric asphalt near downtown Los Angeles. About 10,000 years before the arrival of mammoth traffic jams in the second-largest U.S. city, the two beasts likely got stuck in the goo while hunting a camel, horse or ground sloth, said John Harris, chief curator and head of vertebrate studies at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which oversees the site. ''It's one of the, if not the, richest...

WASHINGTON -- The best evidence yet for the oldest life on Earth is found in odd-shaped, rock-like mounds in Australia that are actually fossils created by microbes 3.4 billion years ago, researchers report. "It's an ancestor of life. If you think that all life arose on this one planet, perhaps this is where it started," said Abigail Allwood, a researcher at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology and lead author of the new study. It appears Thursday in the journal Nature. The strange geologic structures - which range from smaller than a fingernail to taller than a man - are exactly...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters marched Saturday through Manhattan to demand an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq just hours after an American soldier died in a roadside explosion in Baghdad -- the 70th U.S. fighter killed in that country this month. "End this war, bring the troops home," read one of the many signs lifted by marchers on a sunny afternoon three years after the war in Iraq began. The mother of a Marine killed two years ago in Iraq held a picture of her son, born in 1984 and killed 20 years...

In a new book about evolution, the story of the race to find fossils of the ultimate human ancestor intertwines with a human story of the single-minded dedication and competitiveness of the fossil hunters themselves. Ann Gibbons, author of "The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors," will give a free lecture next week at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Since 1990, she has covered human evolution for the journal Science, giving her what she called "a ringside seat" to follow the discoveries as they happened and the scientists who made them. "These people have this grand...

The gateway between the Atlantic and Pacific at the bottom of the globe opened up 41 million years ago, according to a study of old fish teeth. The research in Science pushes back the date of the forging of Drake Passage to twice as long ago as once thought. US geologists believe it kick-started the ocean current that swirls around Antarctica, helping to bring about a dramatic cooling effect. The continent was transformed from lush forest to the icy landscape of today.

In recent days, newspapers worldwide have been blazing headlines similar to what I read in my hometown paper: “Scientists say fossil find completes a human evolutionary chain.” Like the original Nature article2 upon which it was based, the San Diego article is an amazing mixture of fact and fiction. By “fiction,” I mean philosophy or belief that is completely unsubstantiated by factual evidence. In the San Diego newspaper article, Ethiopian anthropologist Berhane Asfaw, one of the Nature authors, is quoted: “We just found the chain of evolution, the continuity through time. One form evolved to another. This is evidence of...

Recently I highlighted how the coverage of Tiktaalik revealed the fascinating phenomenon that only after discovering a new "missing link" will evolutionists acknowledge the previously paltry state of fossil evidence for evolution. This behavior is again witnessed in coverage of the discovery of Australopithecus anamensis fossils in Ethiopia. The media has also exaggerated and overblown claims that this evidence supports "human evolution." The latest "missing link" is actually comprised of a few tooth and bone fragments of Au. anamensis, an ape-like species that lived a little over 4 million years ago. Incredibly, claims of "intermediacy" are based upon 2-3 fragmented...

See for example this thread first. While digging in a Swedish Berm they found fossil sh*t from a worm But like a missing link, will this find raise a stink? It's bound to make some people...squirm!

Close window Published online: 5 April 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060403-7 The fish that crawled out of the waterA newly found fossil links fish to land-lubbers.Rex Dalton The fossilized remains of Tiktaalik show a crocodile-like creature with joints in its front arms. credit Ted Daeschler A crucial fossil that shows how animals crawled out from the water, evolving from fish into land-loving animals, has been found in Canada. The creature, described today in Nature1,2, lived some 375 million years ago. Palaeontologists are calling the specimen from the Devonian a true 'missing link', as it helps to fill in a gap in...