Posted on 02/24/2005 4:22:48 PM PST by aculeus
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) -- Scientists are marveling at a fossil find in California's San Joaquin Valley that has produced the remains of a never-before-seen badger-like creature and a monstrous predator that looks like a cross between a bear and a pit bull.
Among the discoveries was the skull of an animal that appears to be an entirely new genus within the same family as otters, skunks and weasels.
"It just blew me out of my mind," Xiaoming Wang, associate curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, said after seeing the fossil of the badger-like animal. "It looks like it was very ferocious."
A team led by paleontologist J.D. Stewart recovered bones from 25 species of vertebrates, as well as birds and snails, that date to roughly 15 million years ago. The best-preserved 1,200 specimens now make up a permanent collection at the University of California, Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology.
The dig is a legacy of California's power crisis of 2000-2001. The fossils were unearthed during construction of new electricity transmission lines at the so-called Path 15, the infamous utility bottleneck in the state's north-south electricity conduit near Los Banos.
Also found on the site just west of Fresno were the most complete remains yet discovered in the San Joaquin Valley of a bear-dog creature that ruled what once was a savannah-like environment.
Stewart, a research associate at the National History Museum in Los Angeles, said his team found a jaw bone and an inch-long fang from what they estimate was a 200-pound creature.
"They look something like a large pit bull," Stewart told the San Francisco Chronicle. "They're very tough customers."
Also found was the most complete skull ever of the early horse Merychippus californicus, Latin for "ruminant horse of California."
The three-toed horse stood only 3 1/2 feet tall from its shoulders to the ground, said Stewart, adding that the animal marks a milestone on the evolutionary path of horses.
"Horses are getting bigger," he said. "They've got one toe, and their teeth are getting longer. You may not want to call it evolution. Call it what you want. That's what the evidence shows."
Long after the dinosaurs, the horses thrived in the middle part of the Miocene Epoch, during what the Florida Museum of Natural History's Web site calls "the heyday or `hayday' of horses," referring to the change in diet.
Another find _ two-thirds of a giant tortoise shell _ marked the most complete remnant of the ancient creature ever found in California.
"Very little is known about the West Coast tortoises," said renowned turtle expert and retired paleontologist Howard Hutchison. "It's really about the first time ever when you can say with some certainty that it's linked to the ones found in the Great Plains."
Copyright © 2005 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
(But still have my cDK thread game face on.)
LOL!
Der.. Horses are Hippos. Hippopotamus means 'Water horse' in Greek. Hippus = Horse in greek.
It says the fossils were found just west of Fresno. Maybe JimRob planted them as a practical joke. Piltdown Syndrome?
Indeed. If you want to see some spectacular mustelid action (mustelids being members of the weasel family, of which wolverines and badgers are the giants), dig out the BBC Wildlife programme called "Stoats in the Priory" (its narrated by Sir David Attenborough). They filmed British stoats (known as the short-tailed weasel/ermine in N. America) single-handedly killing and dragging home rabbits that were four times their weight and size (stoats are smaller than squirrels!).
Comes from the English words Iron and Horse.
Then again, I guess you could say Horses are train engines already.
My car has 385 horses...shall we go on.
Kind of makes you wonder how a dachshund ("badger dog") can handle a badger?
On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin ......... (enough)
For those in Rio Linda, that's the John F. Kerry family tree.
The more and more i heard about these interesting discoveries, i can see why people back in the days wrote stories of wild animals like dracula and the trolls/elves and stuff like that. Stories of creatures from different lands as people began to travel, and we know how stories become exhaggerated, and also people weren't educated and connected like we are now.
For every evolutionary story presented by the MSM, we never see, rarely anyhow, any stories that Creationists would write to dicipher what actually has been found. The debate between Old Earth vs. New Earth goes on and on and dinos, these toughies who snarl, spit or roar, are stories and discoveries which still split science , religion, faith, empirical facts, cause and effect. For Pete's sake, we can't even get states to approve books with both evolution and creation presented fairly. If you go to the God sites, CRI material is cited and if you go to science sites, only evolutionary material is presented as fact with all other options not even presented.
More evolutionary fairy tales?
Thank you very much for reminding the gullable of that which should be blindingly obvious.
A few years ago, a feminist PhD. expert on such things found an arrowhead with the fragments of what were believed to be the ribs of a pre-ancient woman. She determined (completely objectively, of course) that Siberia (if I remember the location correctly) was once populated with a race of warrior women.
Ah...public education and new charity paradigms.
[...little humor there.]
Thanks for the ping!
Thank you, Mr. Reynolds.
I'm not necessarily a creationist, but I do believe that popular science has, since the grand envelopment of all by Leviathan, developed its own set of beliefs. Top on the list is global warming. Elsewhere is the notion (one you will likely dislike hearing) that SETI is worth a damn.
Michael Crichton made a speech on the topic that was phenomenal.
That is a Goodyear tatoo.
the early horse Merychippus californicusMost likely ridden by the earliest known face-lifted proto-humans: the Pelosyicthus Californicatus.
Sez who?
You learn something new every day on FR. I've read English literature which referred to stoats in an offhand manner (T.H. White, among others, I think) and I always thought they were referring to some tamer creature. Geez, now I gotta re-arrange my ganglia.
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