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Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass. Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the strange rain. Large, sloshing waves threw animals onto dry land, then more waves buried them in silt. Scientists working in North Dakota recently dug up fossils of these fish: They died within the first minutes or hours after the asteroid hit, according to a paper...

A newly discovered species of ancient shark has been named after a 1980s arcade game. The shark swam in the rivers of what is now South Dakota, US, about 67 million years ago, living alongside iconic dinosaur species such as T. rex. It's been named Galagadon, after the 1981 Japanese-US game Galaga, because its teeth resemble the spaceships in the game. The specimen is described in the Journal of Paleontology. "It may seem odd today, but about 67 million years ago, what is now South Dakota was covered in forests, swamps and winding rivers," said co-author Terry Gates, from North...

Democratic House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied an audience of supporters in Washington Thursday evening with calls to implement single-payer health care and tuition-free college – along with an appeal to stop fossil fuel production entirely. Ocasio-Cortez, who is running to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District, has made no secret of her opposition to fossil fuels. She’s called for politicians to forsake donations from the industry and is pushing a “Green New Deal” plan which entails a shift to 100 percent renewable energy by 2035. But she cast her position in stark terms Thursday, during a fundraiser at a restaurant...

Climate change is over. [snip] Judged by deeds rather than words, most national governments are backing away from forced-marched decarbonization. ...President Trump’s ostentatious withdrawal from the Paris Agreement merely ratified a trend long becoming evident. [snip] Climate alarm is like a car alarm—a blaring noise people are tuning out. This outcome was predictable. Political scientist Anthony Downs described the downward trajectory of many political movements in an article for the Public Interest, “Up and Down With Ecology: The ‘Issue-Attention Cycle,’ ” published in 1972, long before the climate-change campaign began. ...Mr. Downs discerned a five-stage cycle through which political issues...

Three boys made a historic discovery in Mississippi after they dug up an intact mastodon fossil while playing in their backyard. The Ice Age-era beast went extinct about 11,000 years ago.

Burials from a cave in Morocco have yielded the oldest human DNA evidence yet from Africa, offering new insight into Stone Age migrations. The DNA samples come from one of the most ancient cemeteries in the world, the Grotte des Pigeons, near the village of Taforalt in northeast Morocco. Beginning around 15,000 years ago, a culture of hunter-gatherers buried their dead with animal horns and other adornments inside this cave. Though burials were found as recently as 2006, archaeologists have been excavating the cave since the 1940s. The name 20th-century researchers gave to this culture —the Iberomaurusians—reflects the theory that...

Rarely in my lifetime have I seen the type of civic engagement schoolchildren and their supporters demonstrated in Washington and other major cities throughout the country this past Saturday. These demonstrations demand our respect. They reveal the broad public support for legislation to minimize the risk of mass killings of schoolchildren and others in our society. That support is a clear sign to lawmakers to enact legislation prohibiting civilian ownership of semiautomatic weapons, increasing the minimum age to buy a gun from 18 to 21 years old, and establishing more comprehensive background checks on all purchasers of firearms. But the...

MANSOURA, Egypt (AP) — A skeleton has been unearthed in Egypt’s Western Desert, whose ancient sands have long helped preserve remains, but unlike most finds this one isn’t a mummy — it’s a dinosaur. Researchers from Mansoura University in the country’s Nile Delta discovered the new species of long-necked herbivore, which is around the size of a city bus, and it could be just the tip of the sand dune for other desert dinosaur discoveries. “As in any ecosystem, if we went to the jungle we’ll find a lion and a giraffe. So we found the giraffe, where’s the lion?”...

The Cretaceous arachnid Chimerarachne yingi was found trapped in amber after 100 million years. Credit: University of Kansas ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ An extraordinary new species of arachnid, resembling a spider with a tail, has been discovered in amber from Myanmar (formerly Burma), of mid-Cretaceous age, around 100 million years ago. The finding is described in a paper appearing Monday in Nature Ecology & Evolution by an international team including Paul Selden of the Paleontological Institute and Department of Geology at the University of Kansas and colleagues from China, Germany, Virginia and the United Kingdom. "There's been a lot of amber being produced...

It looks like a rather cute fluffy toy. But, in fact, this is an artist's impression of a dinosaur that lived 160 million years ago. Latest research suggests the crow-sized dinosaur Anchiornis had feathers on its four wings that fluffed up rather than lying flat like those of modern birds. The primitive feathers may have actually hampered in its early attempts at flight. They would probably have caused drag when the creature tried to glide between trees, say scientists.

A rare triceratops skeleton was discovered by construction workers in Colorado. The bones and skull were partially unearthed last Friday at the construction site of a new public safety building in Thornton, Colorado. Denver Museum of Nature and Science curator of dinosaurs Joe Sertich said it is one of three triceratops skulls that's been found along the Front Range and had likely been there for at least 66 million years...... So far, crews have unearthed a horn and shoulder blade. Triceratops had two big horns over its eyes and a smaller nose horn. Sertich said most fossils found in the...

FULL TITLE: Controversial footprint discovery suggests human-like creatures may have roamed Crete nearly 6m years ago The human foot is distinctive. Our five toes lack claws, we normally present the sole of our foot flat to the ground, and our first and second toes are longer than the smaller ones. In comparison to our fellow primates, our big toes are in line with the long axis of the foot – they don't stick out to one side. In fact, some would argue that one of the defining characteristics of being part of the human clade is the shape of our...

* This may be the most intact primate fossil skull ever discovered. * The fossil comes from a little-known period of primate evolutionary history. Source: Fred Spoor This is Alesi, the skull of the new extinct ape species Nyanzapithecus alesi (KNM-NP 59050). ================================================================================================================================ A group of scientists have found what may be the most intact fossilized primate skull ever discovered, and the find could shed light on the common evolutionary heritage shared by apes and humans. The lemon-sized skull was discovered in Kenya by an international team of researchers, and was dated to the middle of the Miocene era, a...

The fossilized Borealopelta markmitchelli, nodosaur for short, is so well preserved evidence of the animal’s last meal remains in its gut. On March 21, 2011, mining machine operator Shawn Funk at the Suncor Millennium Mine in Alberta, Canada, spotted some unusual rock formations that he suspected could contain fossils. Since a bunch of plesiosaur and ichthyosaur remains had been previously excavated from the region, Donald Henderson, who is the curator of dinosaurs at Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Canada, and a crew were sent to the mine to investigate. Henderson and his colleagues at first were baffled by the fossils,...

Everyone knows you have to watch out for sharks on Australian beaches – but what about dinosaurs? A 130-million year old dinosaur footprint has been found among the seaweed and surf on popular Cable Beach near the town of Broome, Western Australia. Bindi Lee Porth said she was collecting seashells when she felt an indent in the sand. Clearing it away, she found a number of massive, preserved footprints.

Should We Drop the Term 'Living Fossil'? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * › Fossils Show Stasis and No Transitional Forms Mark Carnall at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History recently wrote an article for the UK newspaper The Guardian. He argues that we should stop using the term "living fossil."1 What does his argument reveal about evolutionary thinking? Charles Darwin first used the phrase in the Origin of Species to describe life forms that look essentially the same today as their fossil versions, even though their fossils are absent from intervening rock layers.

A glyptodont shell found in Carlos Spegazzini, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina on December 29, 2015 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A passer-by on Christmas Day found a meter-long shell on a riverbank in Argentina which may be from a glyptodont, a prehistoric kind of giant armadillo, experts said Tuesday. A local man thought the black scaly shell was a dinosaur egg when he saw it lying in the mud, his wife Reina Coronel told AFP. Her husband Jose Antonio Nievas found the shell beside a stream at their farm in Carlos Spegazzini, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the capital Buenos Aires. "My...

India would reject a deal to combat climate change that includes a pledge for the world to wean itself off fossil fuels this century, a senior official said, underlying the difficulties countries face in agreeing how to slow global warming. Almost 200 nations will meet in the French capital on Nov. 30 to try and seal a deal to prevent the planet from warming more than the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is vital if the world is to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change. To keep warming in check, some countries want the Paris agreement to...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday called for Republicans to abandon the corrupting influence of the Koch brothers and other wealthy energy magnates. "This is a party that rejects science and refuses to understand that climate change is real," he said of GOP during the annual Blue Jamboree in North Charleston, S.C. "I understand if you stand up to the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry, that you'll lose your campaign contributions," the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate added. "[Climate change] is already causing devastating problems all over this world. To hell with the fossil fuel industry. Worry more about...

Compilation: Fossil Fuels, LNG, What's the facts? Jacki Daily Show! On this episode of the Jacki Daily Show, Jacki is joined by Anne Korin the co-author of Petropoly. .Moral Case for Fossil Fuels; Restricting Them Means Loss of Human Life – Ethanol Mandate Kills JobsInterviews include Alex Epstein, Author of the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels . Jim Amos, Chairman of Proctor & Gamble's Franchising Division . "Switch” the movie – Can we switch from fossil fuels to renewables? UPDATED – Scott Tinker talks world population growth and the energy mix that will meet its demand over the next decades.