A new paper just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences promises to shed some light on the relationships of early amphibians. It looks like caecilians, which still exist today, were around way back in the Triassic, and that they may have been closely related to stereospondylids. Here is an accessible summary of the research.
New insights on speciation in birds
New research published in PNAS looks at the rate at which genetic differences accumulate in populations of birds. Here is a summary of the work. And here's the original paper. The researchers assessed the rate of genetic differentiation in 173 species of birds, and then showed that higher rates of genetic differentiation correlate with higher speciation rates over longer timescales.
H. sapiens might be older than we thought
Human remains found in Morocco at a site called Jebel Irhoud suggest that our species might be much older than anyone thought--possibly 300,000 years old. Here is a summary of the work. Here is the paper in Nature. And here is a second paper that covers the techniques used to date the remains. The researchers used thermoluminescence dating on lithics that were associated with the human skeletal remains.
Baby Bird Preserved in Amber
Here is a report on the remarkable fossil from Myanmar.
T. rex had scaly skin
Mummified Nodosaur from Alberta
Wherein Turner wins a thing, and we embarrass him
“one of the most productive, original and well-respected scholars in multiple emerging subfields in the philosophy of science.”
http://www.conncoll.edu/news/news-archive/2017/four-honored-with-colleges-highest-faculty-awards.html#.WQulXca1s2x
A Bold (maybe too bold?) Claim About the Arrival of Humans in N. America
A new paper in Nature argues that humans might have been harvesting mastodons in California as far back as 130,000 years ago. Here is an accessible summary. But see here for a skeptical takedown.
The Phylogeny of H. floresiensis
A new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution presents evidence against the hypothesis that the "Hobbits" of the island of Flores are descended from H. erectus. Instead, the authors argue that we have to go deeper into the family tree to find the common ancestor that we humans share with H. floresiensis. Here's an accessible summary of the findings.
Early archosaur from Tanzania with Croc-like ankles
A new paper in Nature reports on Teleocrater, an early Triassic archosaur, more closely related to dinosaurs and birds than to crocodilians, but with ankle bones that retain some croc-like features. The New York Times also reports on the research here.
Rethinking the dinosaur family tree
A new study published in Nature challenges the deeply entrenched distinction between ornithischian and saurischian dinosaurs. What if therapods were more closely related to ornithischian dinosaurs than they were to sauropods? Here is a nice discussion of the research in The Atlantic.
Pinning down the timing of the bison invasion of N. America
A recent paper in PNAS uses ancient DNA research to determine when bison first "invaded" North and South America. The iconic symbols of the N. American west haven't actually been here that long. It turns out that the first migration of bison from Asia occurred between 195 and 135 thousand years ago. Here is a shorter report on the research from The New York Times.
Gregg Caruso on Fossil Hunting
Over at the philospher's cacoon, Gregg Caruso (philosopher at SUNY Corning) discusses his passion for fossil hunting.
"Mitigation and salvage paleontology"
This article in the Washington Post describes efforts to protect fossils at construction sites in California.
A platinum anomaly provides suggestive evidence of a Younger Dryas impact
Understanding the causes of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in the western hemisphere is really complicated. Recently we shared news of research that appeared to count against the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. But a new paper offers fresh evidence in favor of that hypothesis: Traces of platinum found at archaeological sites of the right age.
New podcast features interviews with philosophers of science
Nick Zautra (Indiana University) interviews philosophers of science, including one previous contributor to the Extinct Blog.
Interactive Map for the Paleobiology Database
This is really fun! You can now see which fossils have been found in a particular region.
Canadian microfossils might be 3.77 billion years old
Scientists keep pushing back the age of the earliest known fossils, which also suggests earlier and earlier dates for the first appearance of life on Earth. A new paper in Nature reports on microfossils from Canada alleged to be almost 3.8 billion years old. (Here is an accessible discussion in The Washington Post.)
Evolving Flight: Messier Than You Might Think...
Getting from a little theropod-thing to a fully-powered flying bird-thing is often presented as a pretty direct trajectory, as "as a long evolutionary march in which natural selection progressively refined one subgroup of dinosaurs into ever-better aerialists". In a new paper in science, Stephen Brusatte argues that recent fossil finds suggest that things were way crazier than that...
Evidence for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis fails to turn up
Did an extra-terrestrial impact cause the cooling event known as the Younger Dryas, 12,900 years ago? According to this recent paper in the Journal of Quaternary Science (also discussed here), that hypothesis predicts the occurrence of tiny nano-diamonds. But those have failed to turn up.