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New 'Human' Fossil Borders on Fraud by Brian Thomas, M.S. * An international team of paleoanthropologists reported discovering the earliest human fossils found outside Africa at a dig in the country of Georgia.1 The team told Science that one specimen, "skull 5," is so different from other humans that it significantly widens the range of variation within ancient mankind. The Guardian wrote that among the human remains in Dmanisi researchers found a "spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor," but there is actually more proof against this claim.2 The team found clearly human skeleton parts, along with five skulls...

Scientists Have Found An Ancient Fossilized Mosquito Full Of Blood Jennifer Welsh Oct. 14, 2013, 5:37 PMBlood engorged mosquito Researchers have just published an exciting find: a 46-million-year-old mosquito full of blood. Next stop "Jurassic Park"? Not so fast. The find is really interesting because it's the first example of blood-feeding in these ancient insects. We hadn't had clear evidence of when this began until now. They found the mosquito in shale sediments in Montana. They first found the presence of iron in the female mosquito's belly, then used a non-destructive technique to study the molecules inside the find. They...

Researchers have reconstructed the structure of 4-billion-year-old proteins. The primeval proteins, described today (Aug. 8) in the journal Structure, could reveal new insights about the origin of life, said study co-author José Manuel Sanchez Ruíz, a physical chemist at the University of Granada in Spain. Exactly how life emerged on Earth more than 3 billion years ago is a mystery. Some scientists believe that lightning struck the primordial soup in ammonia-rich oceans, producing the complex molecules that formed the precursors to life. Others believe that chemical reactions at deep-sea hydrothermal vents gave rise to cell membranes and simple cellular pumps....

The study of the world’s oldest early primate skeleton has brought light to a pivotal event in primate and human evolution: that of the branch split that led to monkeys, apes and humans (anthropoids) on one side, and living tarsiers on the other. The fossil, that was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China’s Hubei Province, represents a previously unknown genus and species named Archicebus Achilles. The results of the research were published on 6 June 2013 in Nature. Oldest primate fossil rewrites evolutionary break in human lineage The fossil, which is 55 million years old and dates...

Scientist Stumped by Actual Dinosaur Skin by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Being the first ever to examine a dinosaur fossil long buried in sedimentary rock is thrilling enough for a field researcher. But a team working in Canada found an exhilarating bonus on a hadrosaur fossil fragment—it had actual skin still attached. They found the duck-bill dinosaur fossil near Grand Prairie, Alberta. University of Regina physicist Mauricio Barbi operates state-of-the art synchrotron equipment that can detect and identify chemical signatures without destroying samples. He plans to use the technology to investigate the special fossil and its skin. He told Canadian...

There’s a new twist in the “peak oil” debate. Is it good news for the climate? Peak Oil Question Remains, Debate Continues Ever since M. King Hubbert advanced the theory of peak oil in 1956, experts and non-experts alike have been debating about timing and relevance. (See here, here, here and here.) Hubbert’s argument seems like a no-brainer. Oil is a finite natural resource, so there must come a time when oil production peaks and begins to decline. The question is, when? And for a world economy that is largely fueled by oil, that “when” question is quite germane. If...

OTTAWA – Ancient, mummified camel bones dug from the tundra confirm that the animals now synonymous with the arid sands of Arabia actually developed in subfreezing forests in what is now Canada's High Arctic, a scientist said Tuesday. About 3.5 million years ago, Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island's west-central coast would have looked more like a northern forest than an Arctic landscape, said paleobotanist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

An ancient sea predator had a spiraling whorl of teeth that acted as a lethal slicing tool, according to new scans of a mysterious fossil. Helicoprion was a bizarre creature that went extinct some 225 million years ago.

Long-forgotten remains of a giant dolphin-shaped crocodilian "super-predator" that could devour ancient beasts its size and larger have now been discovered in a museum drawer in Scotland, researchers say. The ancient newfound crocodilian is named Tyrannoneustes lythrodectikos, which in ancient Greek means "blood-biting tyrant swimmer."

A Fossilized Scene of a Spider Attacking a Wasp, Preserved for 110 Million Years Paleontologists have discovered beautifully preserved species trapped in amber before — but this one is extraordinary. It features a parasitic wasp that has become ensnared in a spider's web, with the owner bearing down on it for an attack. But just before the spider was about to have its meal, a drop of resin flowed down from above, freezing the moment in time. Researchers date the scene to the Early Cretaceous between 97 to 110 million years ago in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar — a...

The behaviour of an ancient horseshoe crab in its final moments before death has been captured in the fossil record. A 9.7m-long trackway was created around 150 million years ago when a horseshoe crab fell into a lagoon. The find is of interest because the fossil of the animal itself is present at the end of the trackway, where the animal died. The research appears in the journal Ichnos. The fossil trackway of the animal's last moments - known as a mortichnia, or death march - was discovered in the lithographic limestone of Bavaria in Germany in 2002, where spectacular...

An international team of researchers has announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new fossil primate from Myanmar that illuminates a critical step in the evolution of early anthropoids -- the group that includes humans, apes, and monkeys. The 37-million-year-old Afrasia closely resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age in the Sahara Desert of Libya. The close similarity between Afrasia and Afrotarsius indicates that early anthropoids colonized Africa only shortly before the time when these animals lived. The colonization of Africa by early anthropoids was a pivotal step in primate and human evolution,...

The tallest and heaviest ever known penguin stood nearly 5 feet tall and tipped the scales at around 130 pounds, according to a 27-million-year-old fossil found in New Zealand.

All fossil fuels must be cut to avoid global warming, scientists sayBy Mike De Souza, Postmedia News February 21, 2012 6:10 PM OTTAWA — Two Canadian climate change scientists from the University of Victoria say the public reaction to their recently published commentary has missed their key message: that all forms of fossil fuels, including the oilsands and coal, must be regulated for the world to avoid dangerous global warming. "Much of the way this has been reported is (through) a type of view that oilsands are good and coal is bad," said climate scientist Neil Swart, who co-authored the...

A BEAST lurches through icy waters in a sighting a paranormal investigator thinks could prove woolly mammoths are not extinct after all. The animal – thought to have mostly died out roughly 4,000 years ago – was apparently filmed wading through a river in the freezing wilds of Siberia. The jaw-dropping footage was caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia, it is claimed. He filmed the elephant-sized creature as it struggled against the racing water. Its hair matches samples recovered from mammoth remains regularly dug up from the permafrost in frozen Russia....

Fossil Whale Brain Proves Paleontologist Wrong by Brian Thomas, M.S. | Jan. 27, 2012 Howell Thomas, senior paleontological preparator for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was skeptical when a woman claimed that she found a fossilized whale brain in San Luis Obispo County, California, nine years ago. "The first thing I said when I heard about this finding was that there's just no way," Thomas told the Beatrice Daily Sun. "They brought it in, and sure enough, it's the second of two fossil whale brains [ever found]."1 He explained that "it's an amazing specimen because brains don't...

It's official, long-necked sauropod dinosaurs once roamed every continent on Earth — including now-frigid Antarctica. The discovery of a single sauropod vertebra on James Ross Island in Antarctica reveals that these behemoths, which included Diplodocus, Brachiosaurus and Apatosaurus, lived on the continent in the upper Cretaceous Period about 100 million years ago.

The Bureau of Land Management says a fossil found by employees on federal land represents the earliest record of living beavers in North America. The pair of teeth was found on BLM land in northeast Oregon. The Albany Democrat-Herald reports the teeth come from the Rattlesnake Formation and are 7 to 7.3 million years old. The BLM says the earliest beavers were found in Germany 10 to 12 million years ago and the animals spread across Asia, eventually crossing the Bering Land Bridge to North America. The previous earliest known records of living beavers in North America, from about 5...

Detailed fossilized insect remains preserved in amber for over 23 million years (AFP/HO) Peru researchers make rare ancient insect find (AFP) – 3 hours ago LIMA — Researchers in Peru said Tuesday they have discovered the remains of ancient insects and sunflower seeds trapped inside amber dating from the Miocene epoch, some 23 million years ago. The rare find was made in the remote mountainous jungle region near Peru's northern border with Ecuador, paleontologist Klaus Honninger told AFP. "These new discoveries are very important, because the insects and sunflower seeds confirm the type of climate that existed during the Miocene...

Jena (Germany) Modern scientists would have loved the sight of early reptiles running across the Bromacker near Tambach-Dietharz (Germany) 300 million years ago. Unfortunately this journey through time is impossible. But due to Dr. Thomas Martens and his team from the Foundation Schloss Friedenstein Gotha numerous skeletons and footprints of early dinosaurs have been found and conserved there during the last forty years. "It is the most important find spot of primitive quadruped vertebrates from the Perm in Europe," says Professor Dr. Martin S. Fischer from the University Jena (Germany). The evolutionary biologist and his team together with the Gotha...