National Geograhic News for June 25, 2008 described an early ancestor of land animals.
The latest portrait to emerge, from an especially well-preserved find, reveals an animal with a part-fish, part-tetrapod skull and a full-fledged tetrapod body. It would have spent the majority of its time on water and been clumsy on land.The LiveScience article is here. The Discover article is here. The World Science article is here. The ScienceDaily article is here.
An archaeological excavation at a site near Pulborough, West Sussex, has thrown remarkable new light on the life of northern Europe’s last Neanderthals. It provides a snapshot of a thriving, developing population – rather than communities on the verge of extinction.
The description of an ancient amphibian that millions of years ago swam in quiet pools and caught mayflies on the surrounding land in Texas has set to rest one of the greatest current controversies in vertebrate evolution. The discovery was made by a research team led by scientists at the University of Calgary.The National Geographic News article is here.
Evolution is supposed to inch forward over eons, but sometimes, at least in the case of a little fish called the threespine stickleback, the process can go in relative warp-speed reverse, according to a study led by researchers at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and published online ahead of print in the May 20 issue of Current Biology.The National Geographic News article is here.
A recent study found that a combination of facial structure, forward-positioned molars, and an unusually large gap between the vertical parts of the back of the jaw allowed Neandertals (also spelled Neanderthals) to gape widely.
The finding — the big guy's teeth showed only light wear — might force scientists to downgrade everything they thought they knew about hominids' diets. For starters, the findings could cause this hominid, Paranthropus boisei, to relinquish rights to its long-held moniker, the Nutcracker Man, in the eyes of anthropologists.
Tiny bits of plant material found in the teeth of a Neandertal skeleton unearthed in Iraq provide the first direct evidence that the early human relatives ate vegetation, researchers say.
During the Jurassic, abrupt global warming of between 9 and 18 Fahrenheit (5 and 10 degrees Celsius) was associated with severe environmental change. Many organisms went extinct and the global carbon cycle was thrown off balance. One of the most intriguing effects was that the oxygen content of the oceans became drastically reduced, and this caused many marine species to die off.
Renne and his colleagues in Berkeley and in the Netherlands now have lowered this uncertainty to 0.25 percent and brought it into agreement with other isotopic methods of dating rocks, such as uranium/lead dating. As a result, argon-argon dating today can provide more precise absolute dates for many geologic events, ranging from volcanic eruptions and earthquakes to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other creatures at the end of the Cretaceous period and the beginning of the Tertiary period. That boundary had previously been dated at 65.5 million years ago, give or take 300,000 years.
Geologists studying deposits of volcanic glass in the western United States have found that the central Sierra Nevada largely attained its present elevation 12 million years ago, roughly 8 or 9 million years earlier than commonly thought.
ScienceDaily for April 27, 2008 reported on the lack of heat-generating tissue in birds and dinosaurs.
A team of researchers at New York Medical College has discovered why birds, unlike mammals, lack a tissue that is specialized to generate heat. A new paper contains the surprising implication that the same lack of heat-generating tissue may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs.
The National Geographic News article is here.
The same team that established Tyrannosaurus rex is a distant relative of chickens filled in more gaps, showing that the dinosaur was far more closely related to living birds than to alligators.
But University of Manchester researchers investigating the energy involved in carrying a child say the physical expense to the mother does not support the idea that walking upright was an evolutionary response to child transportation.
Scientific American for April 16, 2008 reported on attempts to synthesize the sound of neanderthal-speech.
Neanderthals have spoken out for the first time in 30,000 years, with the help of scientists who have simulated their voices using fossil evidence and a computer synthesizer.
The newfound evidence, which will be presented in the May issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, shows that part of the canyon known as Upper Granite Gorge formed more than 55 million years ago.The World Science article is here.
LiveScience for April 4, 2008 reported on the new film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.
A handful of journalists filed into a small theater at the Park Avenue Screening Room here last night to see a preview for "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." The 90-minute documentary-style flick features Ben Stein, a comedian, lawyer, actor and former speechwriter. It is a movie about the so-called debate between supporters of "intelligent design" and Charles Darwin's scientific theory of evolution.
The fossil—a small piece of jawbone with a few teeth—was found last year in a cave in the mountains of northern Spain, along with primitive stone tools and bones of animals that appear to have been butchered.
A fish that would rather crawl into crevices than swim, and that may be able to see in the same way that humans do, could represent an entirely unknown family of fishes, says a University of Washington fish expert.
Paleontologists from the University of Rennes (France) and the ESRF have found the presence of 356 animal inclusions in completely opaque amber from mid-Cretaceous sites of Charentes (France). The team used the X-rays of the European light source to image two kilogrammes of the fossil tree resin with a technique that allows rapid survey of large amounts of opaque amber. This is the only known method to discover inclusions in detail in fully opaque amber.
