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And it could shed light on our distant evolution. Says the co-author of a study on the fossilized organ: "We are all related, in the most literal sense." Professor Kate Trinajstic inspects a fossil of an ancient fish at the Western Australian Museum. Curtin University A 380 million-year-old fish heart found embedded in a chunk of Australian sediment has scientists' pulses racing. Not only is this organ in remarkable condition, but it could also yield clues about the evolution of jawed vertebrates, which include you and me. The heart belonged to an extinct class of armored, jawed fish called arthrodires...

An evolutionary insect family tree created by a team of 100 researchers revealed that insects were the first creatures to fly around 400 million years ago. The comprehensive insect family tree covering insects from all around the globe was created as part of a project called 1K Insect Transcriptome Evolution (1KITE). According to researchers involved in the 1KITE project, insects came into existence around 500 million years ago, around the same time when plants started to emerge on Earth's surface. And, it was roughly 406 million years ago, in the early part of Devonian era, when insects got wings and...

Mass extinctions, like lotteries, result in a multitude of losers and a few lucky winners. This is the story of one of the winners, a small, shell-crushing predatory fish called Fouldenia, which first appears in the fossil record a mere 11 million years after an extinction that wiped out more than 90 percent of the planet's vertebrate species. The extinction that ended the Devonian Era 359 million years ago created opportunities quickly exploited by a formerly rare and unremarkable group of fish that went on to become -- in terms of the sheer number of species -- the most successful...

The branches of Earth's oldest tree probably waved in the breeze like a modern palm, scientists said on Wednesday, based on two intact tree fossils that help explain the evolution of forests and their influence on climate. The 385-million-year-old fossils, which scientists believe are evidence of Earth's earliest forest trees, put to rest speculation about fossilized tree stumps discovered more than a century ago in Gilboa, New York. Scientists believe these early forests absorbed carbon dioxide, cooling the Earth's surface. The forests were flourishing at an important juncture in the history of life of Earth, coming shortly before the appearance...

Our research at the State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, has shown, based on a refined division and correlation of the graptolite-bearing strata in southern Jiangxi, China, that the Kwangsian Orogeny commenced in the early Katian Age of the Late Ordovician. Because of its significant research value, this study is published in Issue 11 of Science China Earth Sciences. An angular unconformity separating the Lower-Middle Devonian and underlying strata is widespread in the Zhujiang region of South China, and occurs across most of Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces. This angular unconformity indicates...

William Stein, associate professor of biological sciences at Binghamton University... and his colleagues offer new insights into the world's oldest trees found in an area cited as home to the Earth's oldest forest. Located near the Gilboa Dam in Schoharie County, NY, the region has yielded tremendous tree trunks from the Devonian era, meaning they're roughly 380 million years old. These trunks have been studied by paleobotanists for about a century, but scientists could only guess what the tops of the trees looked like... The fossil, more than 12 feet long, offered the first evidence of how big and complex...

Researchers have unravelled an ancient missing link between today’s spiders and their long-extinct ancestors, and that may help explain how spiders came to weave webs. The research by scientists at the University of Kansas (KU) and Virginia’s Hampden-Sydney College focuses on fossil animals called Attercopus fimbriunguis. While modern spiders make silk threads with modified appendages called spinnerets, the fossil animals wove broad sheets of silk from spigots on plates attached to the underside of their bodies. Unlike spiders, they had long tails. The research was led by Paul Selden, professor of invertebrate paleontology in the department of geology at KU,...

March 26, 2009 — Quick! When was the Age of Fishes? If you said “Devonian,” you were correct according to the textbooks and museums, but where’s your evidence? Look at this diorama in the Smithsonian depicting the seas of the Silurian, the period preceding the Devonian: crinoids, trilobites, corals and nautiloids, but no fish. It may be time to change the artwork and the textbooks. A fully-finned fish, jaws and all, has been found in Silurian rock in China. .... The collapse of a mythology – the fishless Silurian sea – occurring before our eyes. Evolutionists like to quote the...