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Reconstructions of paleo-CO2 levels openly rely on data derived from plant stomata. But when modern (1800s-present) CO2 measurements from stomata conflict with the narrative that humans drive CO2 levels, they are patently rejected. [emphasis, links added] Scientists readily acknowledge plant stomata evidence from one location is “widely used as an effective tool for paleoenvironmental reconstructions” of global atmospheric CO2 from 1 to 150 million years ago (Badihagh et al., 2024). For example, in a new study, 100-150 million-year-old stomata samples from Iran are shown to reconfirm that global atmospheric CO2 levels hit 1,100 to 1,700 ppm during the Jurassic period....

This giant lacewing may hint at hidden populations of the insect in Arkansas. Michael Skvarla/Penn State Back in 2012, entomologist Michael Skvarla stopped at a Walmart in Fayetteville, Arkansas, to pick up some milk. On the way in, he spotted a large, unusual insect on the side of the building. So he snagged it, took it shopping, brought it home and mounted it, thinking it was an antlion, a type of flying insect. Years later, he discovered it was something much rarer: an insect with an ancient history. Penn State shared the story of Skvarla's find on Monday. Skvarla is...

A group of paleontologists discovered a large, well-preserved pterosaur on a rocky beach off the coast of Scotland. Boasting roughly an 8-foot wingspan, the ancient reptile is the largest of its kind to be found from the Jurassic Period. The animal’s existence was a chance find made in 2017, when paleontologist Amelia Penney stumbled across the creature’s head while photographing dinosaur footprints on a rocky beach on the Isle of Skye. The pterosaur was promptly sawed out of the rock (with a couple pauses to deal with the tides, which threatened to wash away the fossil) and exhaustively studied; the...

Palaeontologist Tim Ewin is standing in a quarry, recalling the calamity that's written in the rocks under his mud-caked boots.... ...The misfortune that struck this place 167 million years ago has delivered to him an extraordinary collection of fossil animals in what is unquestionably one of the most important Jurassic dig sites ever discovered in the UK.... ...The quantities involved are astonishing. Not hundreds, not thousands, but perhaps tens of thousands of these animals that scientists collectively call "the echinoderms". It's a great name, derived from the Greek for "hedgehog", or "spiny", "skin". What is a sea urchin, if not...

Several complete skeletons hint at sudden, mass extinctionResearchers from the Whiteside Museum of Natural History in Seymour are unraveling an ancient mystery. "This is life," said Coleton Caldwell, assistant director of the museum. "The first time life is living on land, solely on land, and it's still trying to figure things out, you know? What works, what doesn't work? So it's just really, really, really unique." Working southwest of Wichita Falls, near the shore of Lake Kemp in Baylor County, the researchers have uncovered the skeletal remains of seven dimetrodons. The mammal-like finback reptiles roamed parts of North Texas 60...

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...

Dog walker Jon Gopsill, 54, was stunned when his pups led him to five-foot-long remains The fossil was left exposed by recent storms on the coast of Stolford, Somerset The amateur archaeologist believes the skeleton is that of a Jurassic reptile known as an ichthyosaur =============================================================== A dog walker claims to have stumbled across a 65 million-year-old skeleton on a Somerset beach – thanks to the sharp noses of his dogs. Jon Gopsill, 54, was walking his two pets on the coast of Stolford, Somerset on Saturday when they sniffed out a bone that turned out to be part of...

Dubbed Ambopteryx longibrachium, the blue jay-sized theropod lived 163 million years ago during the Jurassic period. Its wings were made of a soft membrane attached to long arm bones which, when spread, resembled those of a bat. ..." The researchers first thought it was a bird when they saw it in the rock, but after they dug it out, it became clear that Ambopteryx was a dinosaur. The researchers aren’t sure exactly how the dinosaur, which also had feathers, looked as it took flight. It couldn’t flap its wings, so it’s believed the creatures would simply glide. According to the...

Pterosaurs may have scared frenzied tourists in 2015's "Jurassic World," but a newly classified species of the ancient reptile may have scared the wits out of its prey during the Jurassic era because of its massive fangs, a trait largely unseen in any of its relatives. Known as Klobiodon rochei (which means "cage tooth"), the species was discovered after bone fragments were taken from Stonefield Slate — an area, approximately 10 miles northwest of Oxford, described as a "rich source of Jurassic fossils." It was where the Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur discovered in Britain, was found. "Klobiodon has been known...

Paleontologists have excavated a mighty meat-eating, four-fingered dinosaur from an unexpected spot: the Italian Alps. The newly identified beast — dubbed Saltriovenator zanellai — lived about 200 million years ago, and it's the first-known Jurassic dinosaur discovered in Italy, the researchers said. It's also the oldest-known ceratosaurian, as well as the largest (it weighed 1 ton), predatory dinosaur known from the earliest part of the Jurassic. S. zanellai's journey to fossilization and discovery thrilled scientists, who deduced that the dinosaur's body ended up in the sea, where marine critters nibbled on its bones before it was buried. Then, it was...

The fossil of a 180-million-year-old ichthyosaur from the Jurassic era has been discovered and it contains evidence of blubber and skin, making the creature more similar to modern-day dolphins than previously thought. The team of researchers from North Carolina State University and Sweden’s Lund University used molecular and microstructural analysis to determine that the creature, described by National Geographic as a "sea monster," was likely warm-blooded and potentially could use its coloration to help it hide from predators. “Ichthyosaurs are interesting because they have many traits in common with dolphins, but are not at all closely related to those sea-dwelling...

A new species of dinosaur has been discovered, known as Ledumahadi mafube, the largest animal that walked the Earth during its lifetime. Ledumahadi mafube, which means "a giant thunderclap at dawn," in the South African language Sesotho, walked in an unusual way. It did not walk on straight limbs, but rather with a "crouched" stance, causing scientists to believe L. mafube was an "evolutionary 'experiment'." "The first thing that struck me about this animal is the incredible robustness of the limb bones," said lead author Dr. Blair McPhee in a statement. "It was of similar size to the gigantic sauropod dinosaurs,...

Named Ledumahadi mafube, the new dinosaur species weighed 12 tons, stood about 13 feet high at the hips, and is one of the closest relatives of sauropod dinosaurs. Sauropods, weighing up to 60 tons, include well-known species like Brontosaurus. They ate plants and stood on four legs, with a posture like modern elephants.Ledumahadi mafube evolved its giant size independently from sauropods.“It shows us that even as far back as 200 million years ago, these animals had already become the largest vertebrates to ever walk the Earth,” said Professor Jonah Choiniere, a researcher in the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University...

)If humans had lived 200 million years ago, they would have marveled at the largest dinosaur of its time. It's name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn." The recently discovered fossil of a new dinosaur species in South Africa revealed a relative of the brontosaurus that weighed 26,000 pounds, about double the size of a large African elephant. The researchers have named it Ledumahadi mafube, which is Sesotho for "a giant thunderclap at dawn." Sesotho is an official South African language indigenous to the part of the country where the dinosaur was found. "The name reflects the great size of...

Scientists have discovered an ancient, giant, crocodile-like creature in Madagascar that had T-Rex-sized teeth it used for crunching bones,. The discovery helps to fill in the evolutionary gaps of a 74 million year long crocodilian “ghost lineage.” Researchers first discovered fossils of a giant predator on the island over a decade ago. At the time, scientists believed they had discovered a large predator from the Jurassic period and they named the creature Razanandrongobe sakalavae, meaning “giant lizard ancestor from Sakalava region.”

Pterosaurs were giant flying reptiles that flew over the heads of the dinosaurs. Soaring on skin wings supported by a single huge finger, they were the largest animals ever to take wing. Originating in the Late Triassic epoch (around 215 million years ago), they thrived to the end of the Cretaceous period (66 million years ago).Triassic pterosaurs are extraordinarily rare and are known exclusively from marine deposits in the Alps (Italy, Austria and Switzerland), except for Arcticodactylus cromptonellus from fluvial deposits in Greenland.The new Triassic pterosaur is from the Saints & Sinners Quarry near Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.Named Caelestiventus...

Over the course of the past 200 million years, our planet has experienced four major geological periods (the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous and Cenozoic) and one major ice age (the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation), all of which had a drastic impact on plant and animal life, as well as effecting the course of species evolution. For decades, geologists have also understood that these changes are due in part to gradual shifts in the Earth’s orbit, which are caused by Venus and Jupiter, and repeat regularly every 405,000 years. But it was not until recently that a team of geologists and Earth scientists...

Gigantic dinosaurs frolicked and splashed some 170 million years ago in the lagoons of what is now Scotland. That’s what a team of paleontologists has determined after discovering dozens of jumbo-sized footprints belonging to long-necked sauropods on the Isle of Skye. Mixed with the herbivores’ tracks were a few clawed impressions left behind by two-legged meat-eaters known as theropods. The footprints present a snapshot of life during an important period in dinosaur history that has yielded relatively few fossil remains. In the mid-Jurassic, sauropods necks grew longer and the first birds were figuring out flight.Identifying two types of footprints in...

September 25, 2017 | David F. Coppedge Original Dinosaur Egg Pigments Found Add this to your dinosaur soft tissue collection: eggshell pigment proteins that allowed scientists to tell the eggs were blue. Eggs of an oviraptorid dinosaur found in China are still blue and red from the original pigment. Bob Yirka reports the find in Phys.org: The team reports that theirs was the first effort to seriously study color in dinosaur eggs. It came about after the team noted some Heyuannia huangi fossilized eggs that had a bluish tint—researchers had previously assumed the tint was due to mineralization, but the...

Dinosaur Eggs Not Bird-Like After All by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * Evidence for Creation › Evidence from Science › Evidence from the Life Sciences › Life Was Created Fully Functional › Variation Is Limited within Kinds Prevailing secular theory considers birds to be living dinosaurs, but new science is hatching to support the stark differences between these creatures. The data demonstrate dinosaurs were more likely cold-blooded like all modern reptiles. Dr. Gregory Erickson of Florida State University and his colleagues from the University of Calgary and the American Museum of Natural History recently published their findings on dinosaur incubation periods...