Free Republic

The world's oldest known spider silk has been found in a 130 million-year-old piece of amber. The discovery, which dates from the Early Cretaceous period, was made in amber beds located near Jezzine in Lebanon. The fibre is 90 million years older than the thread that previously held the record for the oldest preserved silk, according to the report in the journal Nature. The Lebanese silk strand is four millimetres in length and has tiny glue droplets spaced out along it. The diameter of the thread, and the size, density, arrangement and shape of the droplets, closely match those in...

Dinosaur Breath The largest flying creature alive today is the Andean condor Vultur gryphus. At maximum size it weighs about 22 pounds and has a wingspread of about 10 feet. But 65 million years ago in the late cretaceous period, the last age of dinosaurs, there was another larger flying animal, the giant pterosaur Quetzalcotalus. It had a wingspread of over 40 feet, the size of a small airplane. Other pterosaurs were also quite large. The pteranodons of the late jurassic period, the classic flying dinosaurs of magazine illustrations, had a maximum wingspan of about 33 feet. This presents a...

Mammoth discoveries on the North Norfolk coast could be bigger than the legend of the Loch Ness Monster, if marketed properly, according to a local tourism operator. Louise O’Shea, who runs the Beach Cafe in West Runton, spoke out after North Norfolk District Council missed out on £2 million from the Coastal Community Fund to rebrand a stretch of coastline, between Weybourne and Sea Palling, the Deep History Coast. She explained that the mystery of Nessie attracts around one million visitors to the shores of Loch Ness, in the Scottish Highlands, every year and is estimated to be worth around...

President Trump is skipping this year’s Kennedy Center honors after backlash from the honorees. Three of this year’s five award winners, including television icon Norman Lear, singer Lionel Richie and dancer Carmen de Lavallade, vowed to boycott the annual White House reception. Of the remaining honorees, Queens native and rapper LL Cool J hasn’t commented on whether he would attend, and singer Gloria Estefan pledged to use the event as an opportunity to influence Trump on immigration issues.

June 8, 2017 | David F. Coppedge Stop the Presses! Human Evolution Falsified! Human bones found in Morocco undermine almost everything that has been taught about human evolution since Darwin. But is that news? Happens every year, doesn’t it? This news is so hot, we have to get the word out now and wait for a fuller analysis later. Evolutionary paleoanthropology is in big trouble, if a new find in Morocco is as important as the news are making it out to be. Announced in Nature this week, the discoverers are dating bones from five individuals at over 300,000 Darwin...

Fossils Destroy Human Evolution Story Again Posted on February 16, 2017 The old picture of human evolution is in tatters again. “Your face is probably more primitive than a Neanderthal’s.” That surprising headline on the BBC News summarizes the radical change in thinking of leading evolutionary paleoanthropologists about so-called ‘modern’ humans: i.e., those members of our genus Homo that have been unblessed by the self-serving species name sapiens (“the wise”). If you read Richard Gray’s article without the assumption of evolution, you may find yourself questioning the sapience of some moderns.

Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered a 100-million-year-old insect preserved in amber with a triangular head, almost-alien and "E.T.-like" appearance and features so unusual that it has been placed in its own scientific "order" -- an incredibly rare event. There are about 1 million described species of insects, and millions more still to be discovered, but every species of insect on Earth has been placed in only 31 existing orders. Now there's one more. The findings have been published in the journal Cretaceous Research and describe this small, wingless female insect that probably lived in fissures in the bark...

A dinosaur fossil that almost went undiscovered is giving scientists valuable clues about a family of creatures that flourished just before the mass extinction. The bird-like species, found at a building site in southern China and nicknamed the 'Mud Dragon', was preserved almost intact, lying on its front with its wings and neck outstretched. Scientists speculate that the creature may have died in this pose after becoming mired in mud about 66-72 million years ago. Scientists have named the new species Tongtianlong limosus, meaning 'muddy dragon on the road to heaven'. The two-legged animal belongs to a family of feathered...

Paleontologists have teamed up with a paleoartist to create a model which challenges everything you thought you knew about the typical dinosaur. Dr. Jacob Vinther ofa Psittacosaurus — nicknamed a "parrot-lizard" — is about the size of a turkey, has bristles on its tail and a birdlike beak. In other words, a bit weird, but also pretty cute. It's also quite likely that the animal had feathers and a horn on each cheek, the experts say. Quite aptly, Psittacosaurus belongs to the group ceratopsians, which basically means "horned faces" in Greek. It's the same group that contains Triceratops. The scientists...

In an extraordinary find, a team of Australian researchers have uncovered the world's oldest fossils in a remote area of Greenland, capturing the earliest history of the planet and demonstrating that life on Earth emerged rapidly in the planet's early years. Led by the University of Wollongong's (UOW) Professor Allen Nutman, the team discovered 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolite fossils in the world's oldest sedimentary rocks, in the Isua Greenstone Belt along the edge of Greenland's icecap. The findings are outlined in a study published in Nature, with co-authors Associate Professor Vickie Bennett from The Australian National University (ANU), the University of New...

'Descendants of the Dragon' confirmed at the Liaohe River ValleyIn thousands of years, the Chinese people have been deeming themselves as "the descendant of the dragon" though there is no enough solid proof to support the statement. But in this year, with continually findings of dragons in archeological work at the Liaohe River Valley, the statement that the Chinese people are "the descendant of the dragon" is further confirmed. In thousands of years, the Chinese people have been deeming themselves as "the descendant of the dragon" though there is no enough solid proof to support the statement. But in this...

Fool me once, the adage says, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The reality-based fossil fuel version states: Fuel me for 150 years, fuel me forever – or at least until creative, entrepreneurial spirits can devise reliable, affordable alternatives. The 2016 Democratic Party would change this adage to read: Fuel me for 150 years, fuel me never again. Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton want to regulate drilling and fracking into oblivion, or ban them outright. Clinton also says she is“going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” The draft Democratic Party...

Tubular microtunnels believed to be the trace fossils formed by microbes inhabiting volcanic rock interiors have only been reported in oceanic and subglacial settings. This is the first observation of such features in basaltic volcanic glass erupted in a continental lake environment, the Fort Rock volcanic field. As a result, the record of subsurface microbial activity in the form of endolithic microborings is prospectively expanded. Our understanding of the range of environments and conditions that microtunnels can form in is enhanced along with our knowledge of potentially habitable environments on Earth and beyond. The Fort Rock volcanic field has analogous...

Radiometric backflip: Bird footprints overturn ‘dating certainty’ by Jonathan O'Brien Using well-known radioisotope technology, scientists dated the Santo Domingo rock formation in Argentina at 212 million years old. This happened to agree well with a nearby geologic formation that was also radiometrically dated.1 The radiometric date of the Santo Domingo formation also agreed with the dating based on fossil wood found entombed in the rock. This wood came from an extinct species of tree conventionally believed to have existed around 200 million years ago. Well-preserved and abundant tracks were also found in the rock, similar in appearance to bird tracks....

A 300 million year-old fossil mystery has been solved by a research team led by the University of Leicester, which has identified that the ancient 'Tully Monster' was a vertebrate -- due to the unique characteristics of its eyes. Tullimonstrum gregarium or as it is more commonly known the 'Tully Monster', found only in coal quarries in Illinois, Northern America, is known to many Americans because its alien-like image can be seen on the sides of large U-haul™ trailers which ply the freeways. Despite being an iconic image -- a fossil with a striped body, large tail, a pair of...

New research reveals that the limbs of the earliest four-legged vertebrates, dating back more than 360 million years ago, were no more structurally diverse than the fins of their aquatic ancestors. The new finding overturns long-held views that the origin of vertebrates with legs (known as tetrapods) triggered an increase in the anatomical diversity of their skeletons. The research was carried out by Dr Marcello Ruta from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln and Professor Matthew Wills from the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath in the UK. The authors found that fish...

BOZEMAN (AP) - Montana State University is trying to put a value on dinosaur bones after state auditors said they need it for insurance policies, despite opposition from Museum of the Rockies' dinosaur experts who say it's unethical and dangerous to treat scientific research like it is marketable.

Most recent dating places one wave of human dispersal out of Africa into southeastern Spain at almost one million years ago. Using state-of-the-art dating methodologies, a team of scientists have obtained or confirmed a date range between .9 and .85 Mya (million years ago) as a time when a species of Old World monkey (Theropithecus) and an early species of human occupied the cave site of Cueva Victoria in southeastern Spain. It is a location not far from where many scientists have hypothesized that humans may have crossed over into Europe from North Africa through the Strait of Gibraltar at...

Writing in the journal Nature the week of Dec. 16, Yale's Pincelli Hull and colleagues from the Smithsonian Institution argue that modern extinction rates may be a poor measure of whether we're in the midst of a mass extinction event today -- something many scientists suspect may be happening. Instead, Hull and her co-authors contend, the best way to see a mass extinction in real time is by studying changes in species and ecosystems.

New research led by the American Museum of Natural History reveals that the evolution of modern birds was greatly shaped by the history of our planet's geography and climate. The DNA-based work, published today in the journal Science Advances, finds that birds arose in what is now South America around 90 million years ago, and radiated extensively around the time of the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. The new research suggests that birds in South America survived this event and then started moving to other parts of the world via multiple land bridges while diversifying during...