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After the dinosaurs perished, life on Earth didn't take long to bounce back, a new study suggests. A newfound 60-million-year-old creature called Eritherium azzouzorum—the oldest known elephant ancestor—bolsters the case that whole new orders of mammals were already around less than 6 million years after global catastrophe ended the age of reptiles some 65.5 million years ago. Paleontologist Emmanuel Gheerbrant discovered the rabbit-size proto-elephant's skull fragments in a basin 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Casablanca, Morocco. Elephant ancestors, he said, now join the likes of rodents and early primates as some of the first known mammals to walk the...

Finding a fossil in a coal mine is no big deal. Coal deposits, after all, are petrified peat swamps, and peat is made from decaying plants, which leave their imprints in mud and clay as it hardens into shale stone. But it was a different thing entirely when John Nelson and Scott Elrick, geologists with the Illinois State Geological Survey, examined the Riola and Vermilion Grove coal mines in eastern Illinois. Etched into ceilings of the mine shafts is the largest intact fossil forest ever seen—at least four square miles of tropical wilderness preserved 307 million years ago. That's when an...

BANDUNG, Indonesia (AP) - Indonesian scientists are reconstructing the largest, most complete skeleton of a prehistoric giant elephant ever found in the tropics, a finding that may offer new clues into the largely mysterious origins of its modern Asian cousin. The prehistoric elephant is believed to have been submerged in quicksand shortly after dying on a riverbed in Java around 200,000 years ago. Its bones—almost perfectly preserved—were discovered by chance in March. The animal stood four meters (13-feet) tall, was five meters (16-feet) long and weighed more than 10 tons. It was considerably larger than the great Asian mammals now...

Atheism, for Good Reason, Fears Questions --snip-- That theists and open-minded agnostics and atheists on the pro-Darwinist side of this debate are finally engaging the same fundamentalist atheist dogma that intelligent design proponents have engaged for several decades is a good sign. Fundamentalist atheists are of course fighting back ferociously, because they understand, as perhaps the accomodationists don’t, the profound implications of an understanding of the natural world that is not causally closed. Teleology is obvious in nature. Atheists and materialists intrinsically deny the reality of teleology-- Aristotelian final causation-- in nature, yet nothing in the natural world can be...

Here, we look at a rather different proposal: the decidedly non-standard, non-mainstream Birds Come First (or BCF) hypothesis proposed by George Olshevsky. Rightly or wrongly, BCF has never been discussed in the technical literature (I have at least alluded to it in historiographical articles (Naish 2000a, b)), and all of George's articles on it have been in the 'grey' or popular literature (Olshevsky 1991, 1994, 2001a, b). Thanks, predominantly, to his activity on the dinosaur mailing list (a popular discussion list for dinosaur aficionados and researchers), George's BCF hypothesis was once well known and much discussed, and perhaps considered seriously...

Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, and two colleagues were named this month as recipients of the $500,000 Gruber Prize, one of the world's top awards in the field of cosmology. The Freedman team's work helped scientists to arrive at the currently accepted age of the universe: 13.7 billion years.