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Photos by Kevin Fitzsimons, Ohio State University. COLUMBUS, Ohio -- The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought. The tracks -- two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter -- date back some 570 million years, to the Ediacaran period. The Ediacaran preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved. Scientists once thought that it was primarily microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, explained Loren...

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.

Graves Found From Sahara’s Green Period By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD 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,...

A newly discovered batch of well-preserved dinosaur bones, petrified trees and even freshwater clams in southeastern Utah may provide fresh clues about life in the region some 150 million years ago. The Bureau of Land Management announced the find Monday, calling the quarry near Hanksville "a major dinosaur fossil discovery." Several weeks of excavation have revealed at least four long-necked sauropods, two carnivorous dinosaurs and possibly a stegosaurus, according to the BLM. Nearby, there are also animal burrows and petrified tree trunks six feet in diameter. It doesn't contain any new species - at least not yet - but offers...

Jon Erlandson shakes out what appears to be a miniature evergreen from a clear ziplock bag and holds it out for me to examine. As one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient seafaring, he has devoted much of his career to hunting down hard evidence of ancient human migrations, searching for something most archaeologists long thought a figment: Ice Age mariners. On this drizzly late-fall afternoon in a lab at the University of Oregon in Eugene, the 53-year-old Erlandson looks as pleased as the father of a newborn—and perhaps just as anxious —as he shows me one of his...

This photo provided by Jack Griffith, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, shows Waste Isolation Pilot Plant staff member Sam Dominguez using a core drill to extract salt crystal samples from a salt wall at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. in December 2006. Griffith and his team found cellulose dating back 253 million years _ along with some possible ancient DNA _ in salt crystals from the underground nuclear waste dump. The crystals were taken from newly mined areas 2,000 feet below WIPP's desert surface last fall...

It is a fairly easy demonstration that nothing any larger than the largest elephants could live in our world today, and that the largest dinosaurs survived ONLY because the nature of the world and of the solar system was then such that they did not experience gravity as we do at all; they'd be crushed by their own weight, collapse in a heap, and suffocate within minutes were they to. A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest sauropods, to welterweight or at most...

Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all. Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb. "This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large...

Pterosaurs, like their dinosaur relatives, didn't wait until they were fully grown to have sex, a new study suggests. Researchers examined microscopic tree ring-like growth markings in hundreds of bones from a species of the extinct flying reptiles discovered in central Argentina in the 1990s. The Pterodaustro guiñazui bones came from multiple individuals, including an embryo inside an egg and adults with wingspans between 1 to 8 feet (0.3 to 2.5 meters). P. guiñazui lived during the mid-Cretaceous, about a hundred million years ago. "It is quite amazing that even after millions of years, the microscopic structure of the bone...

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...

WASHINGTON (Feb. 18) - A frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armor and teeth, lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago - intimidating enough that scientists who unearthed its fossils dubbed the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad. But its size - 10 pounds and 16 inches long - isn't the only curiosity. Researchers discovered the creature's bones in Madagascar. Yet it seems to be a close relative of normal-sized frogs who today live half a world away in South America, challenging assumptions about ancient geography. The discovery, led by paleontologist David Krause at New York's Stony Brook...

A pterodactyl so small that you could hold it in your hand glided in forest canopies in northeastern China where it feasted on insects 120 million years ago, new fossil remains suggest. Paleontologists discovered the nearly complete skeleton of a toothless mini-pterodactyl, called Nemicolopterus crypticus, in the western part of China's Liaoning Province. With a wingspan of nearly 10 inches (25 centimeters), this half-pint represents the smallest pterosaur, a group of winged reptiles that shared a common ancestor with dinosaurs and ruled the skies during the Jurassic period (206 million to 144 million years ago) and the subsequent Cretaceous...

Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beasts from the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.Eight tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments. The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks. The scientists released details of the discovery at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, US. They painted a picture of a calamitous event over North America that may have severely knocked back the populations of some...

Amazing find of dinosaur 'mummy' Scientists now think these dinosaurs were more muscular than previously thought Fossil hunters have uncovered the remains of a dinosaur that has much of its soft tissue still intact. Skin, muscle, tendons and other tissue that rarely survive fossilisation have all been preserved in the specimen unearthed in North Dakota, US. The 67 million-year-old dinosaur is one of the duck-billed hadrosaur group. The preservation allowed scientists to estimate that it was more muscular than thought, perhaps giving it the ability to outrun predators like T. rex. The researchers propose that the dinosaur's rump was 25%...

MOST of what we know about dinosaurs has been pieced together from fossilised bones and teeth. But the unearthing of a mummified dinosaur in the US, with preserved skin and apparent soft tissue, has the potential to unlock biological secrets millions of years old.The remains of the duck-billed hadrosaur are in such good condition - with its skin almost entirely intact - that it has already revealed the creature ran faster and was far more muscular than previously thought. But the remains could offer an even greater insight into the evolution and biology of dinosaurs. [snip]

WASHINGTON - One of the most complete dinosaur mummies ever found is revealing secrets locked away for millions of years, bringing researchers as close as they will ever get to touching a live dino. The fossilized duckbilled hadrosaur is so well preserved that scientists have been able to calculate its muscle mass and learn that it was more muscular than thought, probably giving it the ability to outrun predators such as T. rex. While they call it a mummy, the dinosaur is not really preserved like King Tut was. The dinosaur body has been fossilized into stone. Unlike the collections...

Eighteen-year-old Jamie Jordan, nicknamed the Fossil Kid, made the exciting discovery in a hunt around the disused quarries in Yaxley. And Jamie, of Canwell, Werrington, Peterborough, was amazed to also find the bones of a younger creature just 25 feet below the ground. After months of studying with a palaeontologist, the bigger bones have been confirmed as those of a Plesiosaur -- one of the first kinds of extinct animal known to science... Jamie said: "It was a very rare discovery to find so many different skeletons right next to each other. "After more research, we are hoping to donate...

British scientists have stumbled across a fossilized claw, part of an ancient sea scorpion, that is of such large proportion it would make the entire creature the biggest bug ever. How big? Bigger than you, and at 8 feet long as big as some Smart cars....

Dinosaurs like Velociraptors owe their fearsome reputation to the way they breathed, according to a UK study.They had one of the most efficient respiratory systems of all animals, similar to that of modern diving birds like penguins, fossil evidence shows. It fuelled their bodies with oxygen for the task of sprinting after prey, say researchers at Manchester University. The bipedal meat-eaters, the therapods, had air sacs ventilated by tiny bones that moved the ribcage up and down. "Finding these structures in modern birds and their extinct dinosaur ancestors suggests that these running dinosaurs had an efficient respiratory system and supports...

A series of gargantuan volcanic eruptions may have ended at nearly the same time that the dinosaurs went extinct, a new study shows. The find bolsters a controversial theory that massive volcanism contributed to the global catastrophe known as the K-T extinction, which wiped out the dinosaurs and many of Earth's other organisms 65 million years ago. Gerta Keller, a Princeton University paleontologist, presented the new research last week at a meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. She found that underwater portions of the ancient lava flows, known as the Deccan Traps, contained marine fossils only...

The chicken egg has been prepped for surgery – a pea-size hole cut in the shell and covered with sticky tape. And now Hans Larsson, a McGill University researcher, removes it from the incubator, places it under a microscope and prepares to operate. He gently peels off the tape and teases back the membranes that line the shell with tweezers. Through the eyepiece, he can see the tiny dot of a heart, steadily beating. He can also see the bud where he implants a milky bead doused in a protein. He hopes it will coax the embryo to grow a...

The first fossil tracks belonging to large, carnivorous dinosaurs have been discovered in Victoria, Australia, by paleontologists from Emory University, Monash University and the Museum of Victoria (both in Melbourne). The tracks are especially significant for showing that large dinosaurs were living in a polar environment during the Cretaceous Period, when Australia was still joined to Antarctica and close to the South Pole. The find is being reported today, Friday, Oct. 19, at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Austin, Texas, by Anthony Martin, senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory. Martin researched the find with Patricia Vickers-Rich and...

The sabretooth tiger may have looked a fearsome sight with its massive canines but its reputation takes something of a knock with a new piece of research. Scientists who have studied the extinct creature's skull in detail say it had a relatively weak bite - compared with, say, a modern lion. And although those fangs must have been amazing killing implements, they made for a very restricted hunting strategy.....

Boxgrove The man who died half a million years ago In a gravel pit at Boxgrove, just outside Chichester, the remains of a man have been discovered, half a million years old. Only a shin bone and two teeth were discovered, but his position, under thick layers of gravel show that he is the oldest 'man' so far discovered in Britain. The Boxgrove quarry The discovery was made in a gravel quarry. The gravel was laid down in a later Ice Age on top of a chalk bed, which is visible in the upper squares. Originally a stream flowed from...

SALT LAKE CITY - Scientists are amazed at the chomping ability of a newly described duck-billed dinosaur. The herbivore's powerful jaw, more than 800 teeth and compact skull meant that no leaf, branch or bush would have been safe, they say. "It really is like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of dinosaurs — it's all pumped up," said Scott Sampson, curator of the Utah Museum of Natural History. The newly named Gryposaurus monumentensis, or hook-beaked lizard from the monument, was discovered near the Arizona line in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 2002 by a volunteer at the site. Details about the...

Professional paleontologists from around the world are concerned about the misrepresentation of science at the newly opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The Creation Museum has been marketed to the public as a "reasoned, logical defence" for young- earth creationism by Ken Ham, the President and CEO of Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a world-wide scientific and educational organization concerned with vertebrate paleontology, contends that the museum presents visitors with a view of earth history that has been scientifically disproven for over a century. The Creation Museum's fossil exhibitions, though artistically impressive,...

Professional paleontologists from around the world are concerned about the misrepresentation of science at the newly opened Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky. The Creation Museum has been marketed to the public as a “reasoned, logical defence” for young-earth creationism by Ken Ham, the President and CEO of Answers in Genesis, which runs the Creation Museum. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a world-wide scientific and educational organization concerned with vertebrate paleontology, contends that the museum presents visitors with a view of earth history that has been scientifically disproven for over a century...

Burial mounds are often 4000 to 5000 years old, they are visible to everyone and curious recreationists ask questions about them; questions the council are unable to answer as the research on burial mounds has for a number of decades been at a standstill... Fontijn: "Apeldoorn contains the oldest burial mounds in the Netherlands. The first were constructed in 3000 BCE. Added to this, the conservation conditions are good." What does Fontijn expect to unearth? "Definitely not only skeletons. In earlier excavations, weapons, jewellery and other objects were found. I am also curious about what we will find in the...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The discovery of a primitive, shrew-like mammal fossil in Mongolia has revived the view that its modern mammal cousins arrived just as the dinosaurs made their dramatic exit about 65 million years ago, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. Recent studies have placed the arrival of modern mammals at anywhere from 140 million to 80 million years ago, long before an asteroid crashed into Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs."The fossil itself is the least interesting part of the story scientifically," said John Wible of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, whose research appears in the...

mammoth some 12,900 years ago. A team of two dozen scientists say the culprit was likely a comet that exploded in the atmosphere above North America. The explosions sent a heat and shock wave across the continent, pelted the ground with a layer of telltale debris, ignited massive wildfires and triggered a major cooling of the climate, said nuclear analytic chemist Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, one of the scientists who presented the controversial new theory Thursday at a conference of the American Geophysical Union in Acapulco. At least 15 species, mostly large mammals including mammoths, mastadons, giant ground...

archaeologists say could be the biggest fossil find in Pinellas County in nearly a century... The jaw and tooth weigh 65 pounds and are about a yard long. Sarti-Sweeney took the bones home and, after some online research with her older brother, determined the football-sized rock was actually the tooth of a long-extinct mammoth. Paleontology and archaeology experts have confirmed the find, and recent digging at the site has turned up teeth and bones from a second mammoth, giant sloths, camels, turtles with shells up to 6-feet-long, saber-toothed cats and giant armadillos the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Scientists believe the...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

The skull of a bipedal hominid Paranthropus robustus is pictured in this undated photograph. The early human relative from 1.8 million years ago dined on the prehistoric equivalent of a smorgasbord -- fruit, nuts, roots, leaves and perhaps meat, according to a study that casts doubt on a key theory about its demise. (Journal Science/Handout/Reuters) An early human relative from 1.8 million years ago dined on the prehistoric equivalent of a smorgasbord -- fruit, nuts, roots, leaves and perhaps meat, according to a study that casts doubt on a key theory about its demise. The four-foot-tall, 100-pound (45-kg) bipedal...

In recent years, scientists have made sizable gains in what was once considered an impossible art — reconstructing the history of Earth’s atmosphere back into the dim past. They can now peer across more than a half billion years. The scientists have learned about the changing makeup of the vanished gases by teasing subtle clues from fossilized soils, plants and sea creatures. They have also gained insights from computer models that predict how phenomena like eroding rocks and erupting volcanoes have altered the planet’s evolving air. “It’s getting a lot more attention,” Michael C. MacCracken, chief scientist of the Climate...

University of Colorado at Boulder researchers have discovered what appears to be the first evidence of parasites in the gut contents of a dinosaur, indicating even the giants that roamed Earth 75 million years ago were beset by stomach worms. The evidence was found in an exceptionally well preserved duck-billed dinosaur dug from the rocks of the Judith River Formation near Malta, Mont. Assistant Professor Karen Chin of CU-Boulder's geological sciences department and former graduate student Justin Tweet identified more than 200 suspected parasite burrows in 17 samples of gut material from the dinosaur that most likely were made by...

If rodents in Spain are any guide, periodic changes in Earth’s orbit may account for the apparent regularity with which new species of mammals emerge and then go extinct, scientists are reporting today. It so happens, the paleontologists say, that variations in the course Earth travels around the Sun and in the tilt of its axis are associated with episodes of global cooling. Their new research on the fossil record shows that the cyclical pattern of these phenomena corresponds to species turnover in rodents and probably other mammal groups as well. In a report appearing today in the journal Nature,...

Paleontologists have uncovered a 25-million-year-old whale fossil with a monstrous set of teeth and enormous eyes on the coast of Australia.The discovery has researchers rethinking whales’ evolutionary history.Scientists were surprised to find that the vicious-looking specimen is an ancestor of modern baleen whales, gentle giants of today’s seas. The fossil suggests a creature that grew to a little more than 11 feet with teeth about an inch-and-a-half long. Baleen whales, which include the blue and humpback, feed by filtering plankton and small fish from seawater through hair-like fibers in their jaws. Their ferocious forebears, on the other hand, appear to...

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The richest undisturbed cache of dinosaur fossils in North America may change the way we see the distant past... IT WAS THE PROSPECTOR WHO FOUND IT FIRST. Maybe 30 years ago, back when uranium was worth a lot, when people thought nuclear power was your friend. He was working a ridge up at Spring Creek, Wyo., looking for ore with a scintillometer, a modern-day Geiger counter. He was getting a lot of hits. But there was something else. Big, off-color rocks in strange shapes were lying loose on the ground where the wind had blown the dirt off them. The...

In the 1993 movie Jurassic Park, one human character tells another that a Tyrannosaurus rex can't see them if they don't move, even though the beast is right in front of them. Now, a scientist reports that T. rex had some of the best vision in animal history. This sensory prowess strengthens arguments for T. rex's role as predator instead of scavenger. Scientists had some evidence from measurements of T. rex skulls that the animal could see well. Recently, Kent A. Stevens of the University of Oregon in Eugene went further. He used facial models of seven types of dinosaurs...

'Hogwarts' Dragon Unveiled By Larry O'Hanlon, Animal Planet News May 24 — A dragon-like dinosaur named after Harry Potter's alma mater has performed a bit of black magic on its own family tree, say paleontologists who unveiled the "Dragon King of Hogwarts" on Monday in Albuquerque. The newly described horny-headed dinosaur Dracorex hogwartsia lived about 66 million years ago in South Dakota, just a million years short of the extinction of all dinosaurs. But its flat, almost storybook-style dragon head has overturned everything paleontologists thought they knew about the dome-head dinos called pachycephalosaurs. "What you knew about pachycephalosaurs — you...

Scientists have revised their depiction of T-Rex from a dinosaur that walks upright (l) to one that walks balanced on its hips. (Illustration by Frank Cecala) Not Your Father's T-Rex BY CARRIE STETLER   Five years ago, Michelle McCourt was reading her son's favorite bedtime story, "How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight?" when she noticed something strange. The dinosaurs she remembered from her childhood in the 1970s were gone. In their place were unfamiliar creatures like the "apatosaurus" and the "pteranodon." "The brontosaurus didn't exist anymore. A pteradactyl wasn't a pteradactyl," said the 41-year-old mom from Sparta, N.J. As McCourt...

NEW YORK -- Scientists are learning more about what appears to be one of the biggest meat-eating dinosaurs known, a two-legged beast whose bones were found several years ago in the fossil-rich Patagonia region of Argentina. One expert called the discovery the first substantial evidence of group living by large meat-eaters other than tyrannosaurs like T. rex. The creature, which apparently measured more than 40 feet long, is called Mapusaurus roseae. The discovery of Mapusaurus included bones from at least seven of the beasts, suggesting the previously unknown animal may have lived and hunted in groups. That hunting strategy might...

Brooklyn College Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology Alfred L. Rosenberger is part of a team of Argentinean and United States scholars who have identified a new species of monkey that once roamed the forests of South America. The discovery of the monkey species, Killikaike blakei, is the result of painstaking analysis of a small, perfectly preserved monkey skull that was found embedded in volcanic rock by members of an Argentinean ranching family. The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. This fossil, which is dated to 16.4 million years ago, is a spectacular addition...

Zygote Games In Bone Wars, players become paleontologists trying to win prestige. The regular armies of science have long marshaled heavy intellectual weapons in their battle to keep creationism and its cousin, intelligent design, out of the nation's public schools. Among their big guns are philosophers of science, and even DNA. snip... But as many of the nation's science teachers know only too well, repeated declarations from the bench do not necessarily trump community pressure in a country where, surveys show, only a minority accepts Darwinian evolution. So now guerrilla forces are joining the fray, with an unorthodox weapon:...

Introduction: The Illusion of Design By Richard Dawkins The world is divided into things that look as though somebody designed them (wings and wagon-wheels, hearts and televisions), and things that just happened through the unintended workings of physics (mountains and rivers, sand dunes, and solar systems). Mount Rushmore belonged firmly in the second category until the sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved it into the first. Charles Darwin moved in the other direction. He discovered a way in which the unaided laws of physics—the laws according to which things “just happen”—could, in the fullness of geologic time, come to mimic deliberate design....

WASHINGTON — In the era when dinosaurs ruled the Jurassic earth, a 13-foot oceanic crocodile with a short snout and a mouthful of deadly teeth hunted large creatures in the sea, scientists reported Thursday. Nicknamed "Godzilla'' by its discoverers, the new find was much different from other marine crocodiles, which had long snouts with many small teeth. The discovery of the creature, given the scientific name Dakosaurus andiniensis, was reported Thursday in ScienceExpress, the online edition of the journal Science. "This animal was one of the latest members of its family and certainly the most bizarre of all marine crocs,''...

CHEYENNE, Wyo. - Researchers have found tracks of a previously unknown, two-legged swimming dinosaur with birdlike characteristics in northern Wyoming and are looking for bones and other remains in order further identify and name it. "It was about the size of an ostrich, and it was a meat-eater," said Debra Mickelson, a University of Colorado graduate student in geological sciences. "The tracks suggest it waded along the shoreline and swam offshore, perhaps to feed on fish or carrion." The tracks indicate a dinosaur that was about 6 feet tall and lived about 165 million years ago along an ancient inland...

LYME REGIS, England: The snout, teeth, vertebrae and ribcage of a 15-foot reptile that lived off the coast of England 190 million years ago have been found. Geologist Paddy Howe, who is monitoring work on the site in Lyme Regis, says the ichthyosaur looked a bit like a dolphin but was a reptile that swam in the sea at the same time dinosaurs roamed the land, the BBC reported Friday. The remains were found during work to prevent landslides along the coastline and took months to painstakingly remove. "Now it's a case of waiting to identify the exact species and...

Tracks of a previously unknown swimming dinosaur have been found along the shores of an ancient sea in Wyoming, scientists announced today. The tracks reveal an event 165 million years ago when a six-foot-tall, two-legged dinosaur waded into the inland sea and gradually lost touch with the ground. "It was about the size of an ostrich, and it was a meat-eater," said Debra Mickelson, a University of Colorado at Boulder graduate student. "The tracks suggest it waded along the shoreline and swam offshore, perhaps to feed on fish or carrion." Mickelson was scheduled to present her team's findings at the...