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In a quest that has taken him from Oklahoma to Morocco and Poland, Brett has analyzed multiple examples of mass trilobite burial. A smothering death by tons of hurricane-generated storm sediment was so rapid that the trilobites are preserved in life position. These geologic "snapshots" record behavior in much the way that ancient Roman life was recorded at Pompeii by volcanic ash. Burial was rapid, Brett said, but also somewhat delicate. Trilobites, like other arthropods, shed their hard exoskeletons from time to time. "We find molted pieces lying immediately adjacent to each other," he said. "This is proof that the...

I'm getting tired of this urban legend that Meister found human footprints with fossils. Stuff like this embarasses Christians and hurts intelligent design: **** (C) Glen J. Kuban, 1998 - 2005 According to Dr. Melvin Cook (1970), a local rockhound named William J. Meister was hunting for trilobite fossils along a hillside near Antelope Springs, Utah in 1968 when he broke open a slab and discovered a curious oblong marking that he took for a human sandal print. This was quite surprising, since the rock at this locality is identified as the middle Cambrian Wheeler Formation--over 500 million years old....

New research from an international team of scientists is suggesting that instantly recognizable earthy smell after rain is released by bacteria trying to attract a particular arthropod as a way to spread its spores. The smell is a 500-million-year-old example of chemical communication, evolved to help a particular type of bacteria spread. Scientists have long been fascinated by the unique odor that appears when it rains. The scent is particularly prominent when the first rains of a season hit dry soil. Two Australian researchers named the odor petrichor, after an influential study in the 1960s suggested a particular oil is...

Trilobites are one of the most popular fossils for collectors and are found all over the world. The Ute Indians used one species as an amulet, and there is even a cave in France called the Grotte du Trilobite that contained a relic made out of one of these extinct marine creatures.1,2 Trilobites are members of the phylum Arthropoda, which includes spiders, insects, and crustaceans. Today, members of this group make up at least 85 percent of the species on Earth and live in every environment. Insects alone account for over 870,000 of these species.1 God designed all arthropods with...

German researcher Peter Jäger revealed earlier today that he's named a new Malaysian species of spider after David Bowie – the fetchingly titled Heteropoda Davidbowie. But what other animals have been named after famous music stars?

These weird creatures were found in an abandoned foundation pit in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

In a stunning example of evolution at work, scientists have now found that changes in a single gene can produce major changes in the skeletal armor of fish living in the wild. The surprising results, announced in the March 25, 2005, issue of journal Science, bring new data to long-standing debates about how evolution occurs in natural habitats. “Our motivation is to try to understand how new animal types evolve in nature,” said molecular geneticist David M. Kingsley, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “People have been interested in whether a few genes...

HORNY male trilobites may have been fighting it out over the females hundreds of millions of years ago, making them the earliest combatants known to take part in such sexual contests. Rob Knell, a biologist at Queen Mary University of London and Richard Fortey of London's Natural History Museum noticed that some of the trilobites in the museum's collection had horns on their heads similar to those of modern beetles. Male beetles use their horns to battle each other for supremacy, with the winner getting the opportunity to mate. Knell and Fortey wondered if the trilobites used their horns for...

A DEVASTATING burst of gamma-rays may have caused one of Earth's worst mass extinctions, 443 million years ago. A team of astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of trilobite extinctions at that time resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, most agree that it deserves further investigation. GRBs are the most powerful explosions known. As giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives, they fire incredibly intense pulses of gamma rays from their poles that can be detected even from across the universe...

Some 252 million years ago, Earth almost died. In the oceans, 96 percent of all species became extinct. It’s harder to determine how many terrestrial species vanished, but the loss was comparable. This mass extinction, at the end of the Permian Period, was the worst in the planet’s history, and it happened over a few thousand years at most — the blink of a geological eye. On Thursday, a team of scientists offered a detailed accounting of how marine life was wiped out during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Global warming robbed the oceans of oxygen, they say, putting many species...

Explosions In Space May Have Initiated Ancient Extinction On Earth Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a mass extinction on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago could have been triggered by a star explosion called a gamma-ray burst. The scientists do not have direct evidence that such a burst activated the ancient extinction. The strength of their work is their atmospheric modeling -- essentially a "what if" scenario. The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere's...

Study of fossil shells solves unanswered question of how deep sea creatures survived asteroid strike during immense upheaval of the world's oceans... Like the dinosaurs themselves, giant marine reptiles, invertebrates and microscopic organisms became extinct after the catastrophic asteroid impact in an immense upheaval of the world's oceans, yet deep sea creatures managed to survive. This has puzzled researchers as it is widely believed that the asteroid impact cut off the food supply in the oceans by destroying free-floating algae and bacteria. However, in a study published in the April issue of the journal Geology, a team led by researchers...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A meteor's roaring crash into Antarctica -- larger and earlier than the impact that killed the dinosaurs -- caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history and likely spawned the Australian continent, scientists said. Ohio State University scientists said the 483-kilometer-wide (300-mile-wide) crater is now hidden more than 1.6 kilometers (one mile) beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. "Gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out," the university said in a statement Thursday....

Diamonds and precious metals found in the eastern United States might have rained down during the last Ice Age after a comet shattered over Canada and set North America ablaze, all leading to a mass die-off of animals and humans. New chemical analyses of diamond, gold and silver found in Ohio and Indiana reveal the minerals were transported there from Canada several thousand years ago. The question is, how?

Boffins have discovered that "lethally hot" ocean temperatures kept the Earth devoid of life for millions of years after the mass extinction that occurred 250 million years ago. The global wipeout that ended the Permian era, before dinosaurs, wiped out nearly all of the world's species. Mass extinctions like these in Earth's history are usually followed by a "dead zone", a period of tens of thousands of years before new species crop up. But the early Triassic dead zone lasted millions of years, not thousands. Boffins now reckon that the extra-long five million year dead zone was caused by screaming...

Approximately 65 million years ago, when the dinosaurs went extinct, 75% of the planet's many species went with them. It was the world's fifth, and most recent, mass extinction event. Now, according to a July 25 review in the journal Science, the Earth seems to be at the cusp of a sixth mass extinction. Only this time, an asteroid is not to blame. We are. "Human impacts on animal biodiversity are an under-recognized form of global environmental change," the team of ecologists and biologists warn in Science. "Among terrestrial vertebrates, 322 species have become extinct since 1500, and populations of...

"Cosmos- A SpaceTime Odessey" --Tonight in 'Rivers of Life' Neil deGrasse Tyson Covers Evolution and Mass Extinction Events Tonight, the second of 13 episodes of "Cosmos- A SpaceTime Odessey" hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson airs at 9 pm tonight on Fox and at 10 pm Sunday night on the National Geographic channel. Tonight's episode is "The Rivers of Life" and covers evolution and natural selection processes that have made life on Earth as we know it today, and also covers mass extinction events such as asteroid impacts with our planet that have drastically altered the course and progress of...

New re­search sug­gests wooly mam­moths, the gi­gantic cousins of mod­ern ele­phants, al­so died out as a re­sult of cli­mate change fol­low­ing a cos­mic im­pact—and that blast may have shocked hu­man popula­t­ions as well. Ei­ther a com­et scrap­ing the at­mos­phere or a me­te­or­ite slam­ming in­to the Earth caused glob­al-scale com­bus­tion, scorch­ing the air, melt­ing bed­rock and al­tered the course of Earth’s his­to­ry, ac­cord­ing to re­searcher Ken­neth Tanker­s­ley of the Uni­vers­ity of Cin­cin­nati. Tanker­s­ley said while the cos­mic strike had an im­me­di­ate and deadly ef­fect, the long-term side ef­fects were far more dev­as­tat­ing – si­m­i­lar to Kra­ka­to­a’s af­termath but many times worse...

Catastrophic Comet Chilled and Killed Ice Age Beasts Jeanna Bryner LiveScience Staff Writer LiveScience.com Mon May 21, 9:30 AM ET An extraterrestrial object with a three-mile girth might have exploded over southern Canada nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out an ancient Stone Age culture as well as megafauna like mastodons and mammoths. The blast could be to blame for a major cold spell called the Younger Dryas that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, a period of time spanning from about 1.8 million years ago to 11,500 years ago. Research, presented today at a meeting of the American...

A huge explosion halfway across the galaxy packed so much power it briefly altered Earth's upper atmosphere in December, astronomers said Friday.No known eruption beyond our solar system has ever appeared as bright upon arrival. But you could not have seen it, unless you can top the X-ray vision of Superman: In gamma rays, the event equaled the brightness of the full Moon's reflected visible light. The blast originated about 50,000 light-years away and was detected Dec. 27. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (10 trillion kilometers). The commotion was caused by...