. . . and left some really cool fossilized skin impressions. Found near Barcelona, Spain, these fascinating fossils were formed in somewhat the same way as more familiar footprints.
. . . and left some really cool fossilized skin impressions. Found near Barcelona, Spain, these fascinating fossils were formed in somewhat the same way as more familiar footprints.
Fir the first time, researchers document the use of a stone with dinosaur tracks in an Ancestral Puebloan building in Utah. The research was presented at the recent Geological Society of America meeting, but you can read about it here.
Adrienne Mayor writes here about a trove of fossils, originally collected by ancient Egyptians, and now sitting in storage.
A wonderfully preserved Psittacosaurus specimen from the Jehol province in China has yielded enough information for paleoartist Bob Nicholls to produce the "most accurate depiction of a dinosaur ever created." More at The Guardian.
This animal lived at the same time as early dinosaurs, but was probably larger than any of its dinosaur contemporaries.
This fossil from 48 million years ago captures three links in the food chain: a lizard ate a bug. Then a snake ate the lizard. Then the snake died.
In fields like paleoanthropology, where there aren't that many fossils, and the ones we have are are housed in museums and labs around the world, digital scanning and 3D printing could change how scientists share data. It's now possible to print out Lucy's bones.
See the news story in Nature here.
A new specimen from British Columbia suggests that small-bodied pterosaurs persisted a good deal longer than anyone had thought, and that small pterosaurs must have coexisted with birds for a long time.
Scientists are now reporting stromatolite fossils that seem to be around 3.7 billion years old, and 220 million years older than the oldest previously known stromatolites. (For perspective, just think of all that's happened biologically in the last 220 million years.)
Here is an accessible discussion in The New York Times.
And here is the original paper in Nature.
If this holds up, these will be the oldest fossils yet found. And they suggest that microbial life on Earth was well established a good deal earlier than anyone had previously realized.
New evidence from Poland suggests that trilobites migrated in single file, like some living arthropod species.
Carl Zimmer, at The New York Times, reports on recent research at the University of Chicago. Scientists trying to understand the evolutionary origins of tetrapods have discovered some fascinating similarities in the developmental processes that lead to fins (in fish) and digits (in tetrapods).
And here's the original paper, published in Nature.
This new research is remarkable both for the dating techniques used, and for the suggestion that a lack of freshwater resources might have done in the very last of the mammoths.
This could be the largest carnivorous dinosaur track found so far. See a news report here.
New research is suggesting that LUCA--the last universal common ancestor of life on Earth--may have been an extremophilic microbe. It's a fascinating effort to draw inferences about organisms that lived way, way, back in deep time.