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Peripatopsis barnardi represents the first ever species from the little Karoo, which indicates that the area was historically more forested than at present. It is one of seven new species from the Cape Fold Mountains described by researchers from Stellenbosch University. Credit: Savel Daniels A newly discovered velvet worm species is the first ever found in South Africa’s arid Karoo region. In March 2022, Stellenbosch University student Rohan Barnard was exploring a farm in the Swartberg Mountains between Calitzdorp and Oudtshoorn, turning over rocks in search of ants, reptiles, and other small creatures. During his search, he made the discovery...

Meet Mosura fentoni, a bizarre 506-million-year-old “sea-moth” with three eyes, claws, and an abdomen full of gills. This ancient predator sheds light on arthropod evolution and reveals stunning internal anatomy from a fossil site like no other. Credit: Danielle Dufault, © ROM, edited A newly uncovered 506-million-year-old creature called Mosura fentoni is rewriting the story of early ocean life. With three eyes, tooth-lined jaws, and gill-lined abdominal segments, it’s a strange but telling fossil from the Burgess Shale. A New Predator Emerges From Deep Time Paleontologists from the Manitoba Museum and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have uncovered an extraordinary...

A potential 370-mile-wide crater in Australia, known as MAPCIS, may reshape our understanding of Earth’s geological history. Researchers found geological evidence, including shocked minerals and melt rock, suggesting a massive impact at the end of the Ediacaran period. (Artist’s concept.) Credit: SciTechDaily.com =========================================================================== Research team is delving into history, exploring events that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago. A potential crater over 370 miles (600 kilometers) wide in central Australia may transform our knowledge of Earth’s geological past. Researcher Daniel Connelly and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Arif Sikder, Ph.D., believe they have found evidence to support the existence of MAPCIS...

Artistic reconstruction of two species of trilobite an instant before burial in a flow of volcanic ash 510 million years ago. Image credit: © Prof. A. El Albani, Univ. Poitiers =================================================================== Trilobites that date back 508 million years have been found preserved in volcanic matter, revealing never-before-seen details in 3D form. Their fossilization was so rapid that tiny shells have been preserved in situ, and soft tissues including mouthparts and internal organs can still be seen. The trilobites were entombed in pyroclastic flow, which is the hot, dense material that comes hurtling out of volcanoes sometimes reaching speeds as high...

Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonized the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that scientists didn't know existed.

I'm getting tired of this urban legend that Meister found human footprints with fossils. Stuff like this embarasses Christians and hurts intelligent design: **** (C) Glen J. Kuban, 1998 - 2005 According to Dr. Melvin Cook (1970), a local rockhound named William J. Meister was hunting for trilobite fossils along a hillside near Antelope Springs, Utah in 1968 when he broke open a slab and discovered a curious oblong marking that he took for a human sandal print. This was quite surprising, since the rock at this locality is identified as the middle Cambrian Wheeler Formation--over 500 million years old....

The modern theory of evolution has its roots in Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which he proposed the fundamental conjecture that “all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form.”1 In the extrapolation of this concept, millions of progressive life forms should have developed in an evolutionary continuum along all the different branches of life leading up to the huge diversity of plants and animals that are alive today. Many current biology textbooks depict this universal common ancestry as a “tree of life” similar to the...

Cambroraster falcatus was an ancient, primitive arthropod that dominated the ocean approximately 506 million years ago during the Cambrian period. The creature's name was inspired, in part, by Star Wars' Millennium Falcon due to its similar resemblance of the fictional spacecraft (sort of). C. falcatus, which was roughly the size of a human hand when fully grown though this fossil was nearly a foot long, also bore a striking resemblance to the modern horseshoe crab, per a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The anatomy of the apex predator featured a carapace that covered its...

The sea bed in the deep ocean during the Cambrian period was thought to have been inhospitable to animal life because it lacked enough oxygen to sustain it. But research published in the scientific journal Geology reveals the existence of fossilized worm tunnels dating back to the Cambrian period­­ 270 million years before the evolution of dinosaurs. The discovery, by USask professor Brian Pratt, suggests that animal life in the sediment at that time was more widespread than previously thought. The worm tunnels—burrows where worms lived and munched through the sediment—are invisible to the naked eye. But Pratt “had a...

New fossils and sites are helping make sense of the mysterious flowering of animal life half a billion years ago The drumming of the jackhammer deepens. Then, a block of shale butterflies open, exposing to crisp mountain air a surface that hasn't seen sunlight in half a billion years. “Woo!” says paleontologist Cédric Aria of the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China, bracing the top slab of rock upright.Its underside bears charcoal-colored smudges that look vaguely like horseshoe crabs or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. “It's a spaceship landing area here,” says expedition leader Jean-Bernard Caron, curator...

A previously unclassified creature that lived over 500 million years ago, considered the "Holy Grail of paleontology," has finally been identified, thanks to fossil fat. The creature, known as Dickinsonia, was previously found in northwest Russia near the White Sea. It had not been classified before, until other recently found Dickinsonia fossils showed the presence of organic tissue, allowing researchers to identify molecules of cholesterol, described as "a hallmark" of animals. Brocks added: “Scientists have been fighting for more than 75 years over what Dickinsonia and other bizarre fossils of the Edicaran Biota were: giant single-celled amoeba, lichen, failed experiments...

Here's a brainteaser: Do the 520-million-year-old fossils of an ancient, bug-like creature actually show a silhouette of its brains? Or are these blobby shapes in its head merely fossilized bacteria? According to a new study, the fossilized structures in the Cambrian-period creature's head aren't brainy remains, but rather fossilized bacterial mats, called biofilms. However, not everyone is on board with this interpretation. The researchers who originally discovered the brains are standing by their results, and other paleontologists Live Science interviewed agree with them. [Fabulous Fossils: Gallery of Earliest Animal Organs] The creature in question, Fuxianhuia protensa, is an early arthropod,...

Scientists investigating an abandoned quarry in Canada have found what appear to be the oldest known footprints of terrestrial creatures - bug-like creatures 30 centimetres long that crawled from the sea and left tracks in sandy dunes. The sandstone is between 480 and 500 million years old. Scientists believe the discovery region, just north of Lake Ontario outside Kingston, Ontario, was a sandy beach on a primordial sea. Scientists say the find pushes back the colonisation of land by about 40 million years and puts it in or near the late Cambrian period, when the seas were starting to boil...

Most of the major groups in the animal kingdom we know today first appeared in the fossil record around 540 million years ago, which geologists consider the beginning of the Cambrian Period. It’s likely that the ancestors of these groups already existed, but since the fossil record depends mostly on skeletons being preserved in sediment that later becomes rock, the ancestors of today’s animals couldn’t really leave their mark on the fossil record until they evolved hard skeletons. And about 540 million years ago, that’s exactly what they did... Some animals had evolved the trick of building skeletons for themselves...

Paleontologists have discovered the fossilized remains of a new arthropod. Yawunik kootenayi was swimming around oceans in Canada in the Cambrian period, 508 million years ago. It's thought to share a common ancestor with today's spiders and scorpions. The arthropod had four eyes and arms lined with both tiny claws to help it feed, and long antennae to sense its surroundings. The study's lead author says species today don't have limbs that function like that. "This dual function is very, very special, because it does not appear in modern forms. If you take insects as an example, they have a...

Cambrian Fossil Intensifies Evolutionary Conundrum by Brian Thomas, M.S. * New fossil finds further verify one of evolution's biggest problems: the Cambrian explosion. According to evolutionary reckoning, a massive explosion of new life supposedly spawned dozens of brand-new fully formed body plans about 530 million years ago. How could so many novel body plans emerge in such a short time while today's emergence rate of new body plans is zero? Details from newly discovered Canadian fossil fish intensify this Cambrian conundrum.1 Very few fossils show up in rock layers below the Cambrian—some sponges, cnidarians, a mollusk, what look like worm...

Fossil Hallucigenia sparsa from the Burgess Shale Courtesy of M. R. Smith / Smithsonian InstituteThe spines along its back were thought to be legs, its legs thought to be tentacles along its back, and its head was mistaken for its tail. The animal, known as Hallucigenia due to its otherworldly appearance, had been considered an ‘evolutionary misfit’ as it was not clear how it related to modern animal groups. Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered an important link with modern velvet worms, also known as onychophorans, a relatively small group of worm-like animals that live in tropical...

Trilobites are one of the most popular fossils for collectors and are found all over the world. The Ute Indians used one species as an amulet, and there is even a cave in France called the Grotte du Trilobite that contained a relic made out of one of these extinct marine creatures.1,2 Trilobites are members of the phylum Arthropoda, which includes spiders, insects, and crustaceans. Today, members of this group make up at least 85 percent of the species on Earth and live in every environment. Insects alone account for over 870,000 of these species.1 God designed all arthropods with...

Another Cambrian Discovery Discredits Evolution by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * A fossil creature from the phylum Entoprocta (invertebrate animals that have tentacles and lacking a mineralized skeleton) was found in marked abundance (over 400 individuals) in Burgess Shale. The Burgess is a sedimentary layer that's purportedly part of the Cambrian period about a half-billion years ago, according to evolutionists.1 The problem for paleontologists is that the supposedly 520 million year old creature looks exactly like its living counterparts, only up to 8 eight times larger. The Cambrian geologic system is an enigma for the evolutionary paradigm. If evolution is true,...

A prehistoric eel-like creature discovered in a Canadian shale bed has been identified as the earliest known ancestor of man. Fossils dating back 505 million years preserve the relics of tiny, slithering animals which are the oldest life forms ever discovered with primitive spinal cords. As the precursor of vertebrates the species is also believed to be the direct ancestor of all members of the chordate family, which includes fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals. The finding means the 5cm long creatures, known as Pikaia gracilens, were the forerunners of animals as diverse as snakes, swans and humans, scientists said....