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What happened to the wood that made it that way in the beautiful petrified trees in the forests of Arizona? They believe that petrified wood is so old that in the prehistoric period it has emerged. But do you know how petrified wood was made? This guide will show you how. What is petrified wood and how is it formed? Fossil wood is considered to have grown when the material of the plant is buried by sediment. When the wood is buried deep in the muck, it is protected from decay caused by exposure to oxygen and organisms.

Ecological reconstruction of Kylinxia. Credit: Huang Diying ========================================================================== The arthropods have been among the most successful animals on Earth since the Cambrian Period, about 520 million years ago. They are the most familiar and ubiquitous, and constitute nearly 80 percent of all animal species today, far more than any other animals. But how did arthropods evolve and what did their ancestors look like? These have been a major conundrum in animal evolution puzzling generations of scientists for more than a century. Now researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) have discovered...

To understand how and why color is preserved in some amber fossils but not in others, and whether the colors seen in fossils are the same as the ones insects paraded more than 99 million years ago, the researchers used a diamond knife blades to cut through the exoskeleton of two of the colorful amber wasps and a sample of normal dull cuticle. Using electron microscopy, they were able to show that colorful amber fossils have a well-preserved exoskeleton nanostructure that scatters light. The unaltered nanostructure of colored insects suggested that the colors preserved in amber may be the same...

One of these Neanderthal genomes was from an individual (Vindija 33) found in Vindija Cave in Croatia, whereas the other Neanderthal genome (Denisova 5 or the Altai Neanderthal) and the Denisovan genome (Denisova 3) both came from specimens discovered in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains... The researchers found that Chagyrskaya 8 lived 80,000 years ago, about 30,000 years after the Denisova 5 Neanderthal and 30,000 years before the Vindija 33 Neanderthal. They also found that the Chagyrskaya Neanderthal was a female and that she was more closely related to Vindija 33 and other Neanderthals in western Eurasia than to...

Named Kampecaris obanensis, the prehistoric millipede lived during the Silurian period, about 425 million years ago. The ancient creature was a small (2-3 cm in length), short-bodied animal with three recognizable sections. It likely lived near a lake in a semi-arid forested environment and ate decomposing plants. Its fossilized remains were unearthed on the island of Kerrera in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. The specimen is about 75 million years younger than the age other paleontologists have estimated the oldest millipede to be using a technique known as molecular clock dating. The oldest fossil of a land-dwelling, stemmed plant, Cooksonia, has...

Named Antarcticoolithus bradyi, the new fossil is the first fossilized egg found in Antarctica. The specimen exceeds eggs of all known non-avian dinosaurs in volume and differs from them in structure. Measuring 29 by 20 cm (11.4 by 7.9 inches) and weighing 6.5 kg, it is the largest soft-shell egg ever discovered and the second-largest egg of any known animal. Although the elephant bird egg is slightly larger, its eggshell is roughly five times thicker. University of Texas at Austin paleontologist Lucas Legendre and his colleagues from the United States and Chile think that Antarcticoolithus bradyi was laid by a...

A team of paleontologists from the United States, Canada and Argentina has analyzed the fossilized eggs of two different non-avian dinosaurs, Protoceratops and Mussaurus, and found that the eggs resembled those of turtles in their microstructure, composition, and mechanical properties. They've also found that hard-shelled eggs evolved at least three times independently in the dinosaur family tree. For many years there was scant fossil evidence of dinosaur eggs, and all known examples were characterized by thick, calcified shells -- leading paleontologists to speculate that all dinosaur eggs were hard-shelled, like those of modern crocodiles and birds. "The assumption has always...

Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 dinosaur bones from the Jurassic Mygatt-Moore Quarry, a 152-million-year-old fossil deposit in western Colorado, looking for bite marks. They found more than they were expecting. Big theropod dinosaurs such as Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus ate pretty much everything - including each other... There were theropod bites on the large-bodied sauropods, whose gigantic bones dominate the assemblage, bites on the heavily armored Mymoorapelta, and lots of bites on theropods too, especially the common remains of Allosaurus. There were hundreds of them, in frequencies far above the norm for dinosaur-dominated fossil sites. Some were on meaty bones like...

Researchers have found the fossilized remains of a new species of lizard inside the stomach of a small flying dinosaur known as a microraptor. Known as Indrasaurus wangi (after an ancient Hindu legend), the lizard was found almost entirely complete, SWNS reports. The lizard was swallowed whole, head first, by the microraptor, a crucial clue that provides new information into the eating habit of the winged dinosaur. "The new lizard had teeth unlike any other previously known from the Jehol Biota, thus expanding the diversity of this clade and possibly suggesting a unique diet for this new species," according to...

There's room for all types in a newly described fossil that shows 259 baby fish swimming together in a school, approximately 50 million years ago. According to the authors of a new study published Wednesday (May 29) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, this ex-school may be the earliest known fossil evidence that prehistoric fish swam in unison, just as modern fish do today. A team of Arizona researchers stumbled upon this remarkable rock during a visit to the Oishi Fossils Gallery of Mizuta Memorial Museum in Japan. Working with the museum, the researchers determined that the...

The researchers found their watery prize while drilling sediment core samples out of the underwater limestone deposits that make up the Maldives archipelago in South Asia. After hauling each core onto their research vessel, the team sliced up the rock like a tube of cookie dough and put the pieces into a hydraulic press that squeezed any remnant moisture out of the pores. When the researchers tested the composition of these fresh-pressed water samples aboard their ship, they were surprised to find that the water was extremely salty — far saltier than the Indian Ocean is today. They did more...

The find, made in 110-million-year-old deposits in northwest China, is of a new species known as Avimaia schweitzerae and the fossil has been described as "incredibly well preserved." The new species belongs to the group known as Enantiornithes, which were fairly common in the Cretaceous period, living alongside dinosaurs. However, the fossilized egg may have resulted in the death of the so-called mother bird, researchers said. "The egg shell consists of two layers instead of one as in normal healthy bird eggs, indicating the egg was retained too long inside the abdomen," Dr. Alida Bailleul said in comments obtained by...

They probably appeared in Poland approximately 300,000 years ago. The oldest stone tools they used, discovered on the Vistula, are over 200,000 years old, and the remains are over 100,000 years old. "On the bank of the river in Pietraszyno, we discovered an unprecedented amount of flint products - 17,000 - abandoned by Neanderthals approximately 60,000 years ago" - says Dr. Andrzej Wisniewski from the Institute of Archaeology, University of Wroclaw. Since 2018, the researcher has been conducting joint excavations with researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig in the framework of a National Science Centre...

The prestigious international journal Quaternary Science Reviews has just published a paper which has involved the participation of Gibraltarian scientists from the Gibraltar National Museum alongside colleagues from Spain, Portugal and Japan. The results which have been published come from an area of the Catalan Bay Sand Dune. This work started ten years ago, when the first dates using the OSL method were obtained. It is then that the first traces of footprints left by vertebrates were found. In subsequent years the successive natural collapse of sand has revealed further material and has permitted a detailed study including new dates....

More than 3.8 billion years ago, in a time period called the Hadean eon, our planet Earth was constantly bombarded by asteroids, which caused the large-scale melting of its surface rocks. Most of these surface rocks were basalts, and the asteroid impacts produced large pools of superheated impact melt of such composition. These basaltic pools were tens of kilometres thick, and thousands of kilometres in diameter. “If you want to get an idea of what the surface of Earth looked like at that time, you can just look at the surface of the Moon which is covered by a vast...

Hagfish Haunts Darwin A zombie hagfish rises from the dead, and scares Darwin from two directions. January 24, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Hagfish are eel-like fish that look like creatures from a horror movie. Their tapir-like snouts are scary enough, but when threatened, they have a unique weapon: slime! They can spread a net of sticky slime around them that can clog the gills of an attacker. And they have been doing this for at least 100 million Darwin Years, perhaps 300 million.

It turns out that our galaxy looks the way it does today thanks to a run-in with something called the 'Gaia Sausage'. As greasy as space is, we're not talking cosmic processed foods here. Rather, astronomers have found signs that a small galaxy smashed into the Milky Way billions of years ago, leaving behind a mess of stars with some rather unusual orbits. So, what makes this cosmic object a 'sausage'? Cambridge University astronomer Wyn Evans says it all came down to the paths of the stars following the impact... Collisions between galaxies aren't all that unusual, and the Milky...

Just like the modern platypus, this 250-million-year-old, Triassic-age marine reptile likely used its cartilaginous bill to discover and seize its next meal, a new study finds. "This animal had unusually small eyes for the body, only rivaled by some living animals that rely on senses other than vision and feed in the dusk or darkness — for example some shrews, badgers and the duck-billed platypus," said study lead researcher Ryosuke Motani, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis. "So, it most likely used tactile senses [with its] platypus-like bill to detect prey in the dusk or darkness." ..." Previously,...

ll 'Obamacare' health care reform become law in the United States? 'Obamacare' health care reform (see contract rules) to become law before midnight ET 30 Jun 2010

Archaeologists have discovered what they believe is man's earliest map, dating from almost 14,000 years ago Photo: EPA A stone tablet found in a cave in Abauntz in the Navarra region of northern Spain is believed to contain the earliest known representation of a landscape. Engravings on the stone, which measures less than seven inches by five inches, and is less than an inch thick, appear to depict mountains, meandering rivers and areas of good foraging and hunting.