Free Republic

“Mitch McConnell has an unusual admonition for the new Republican majority as it takes over the Senate this week: Don’t be ‘scary.’”... Democrats are dubious of McConnell’s pledge to avert edge-of-the-cliff moments. They believe he will run into the same problems that have bedeviled House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) during the past four years — including the inability to corral rabble-rousers such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to support an agenda that conservative critics will probably view as not bold enough in challenging Obama. Appeasing those far-right conservatives will lead to an agenda that Democrats hope to exploit in...

Ghost Lineage Spawns Evolution Ghost Story by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Fossils seem to tell amazing stories about ancient animal life, but close inspection reveals that these stories differ from each other not because of different fossils, but because of different interpretations. Do the remarkable circumstances surrounding a newly discovered fossil arthropod tell two stories or just one?

... heated fight for a seat on Louisiana's Public Service Commission (PSC) is still going strong. December runoff between PSC chairman Eric Skrmetta and alternative energy advocate Forest Bradley-Wright.

Is Every Fossil in Its (Evolutionary) Place? by Vernon R. Cupps, Ph.D., and Brian Thomas, M.S.* During a recent televised debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham, Mr. Nye claimed that fossils are never found “out of place.”1 If by this he means they are never found outside of the rock strata that define the supposed age in which the fossilized creatures lived, he’s wrong. He then challenged viewers to find one single contrary instance anywhere in the world. That’s easy. The fossil record is not nearly as evolutionary as Mr. Nye would have us believe. It features fossils mixed...

Live Birth Fossil Exposes Evolutionary Enigma by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Fossils sometimes capture brief, fleeting moments. Pterosaur footprints, raindrop craters, ripple marks, and half-swallowed fish adorn Earth's layers. And now researchers have discovered a baby ichthyosaur, an extinct fish-like reptile, halfway in and out of its mother's body. Though fossilization tragically ended the baby's transition from the womb, could this specimen support the story that a land reptile evolved into the first ichthyosaur? The rare find was one of 80 fossils of Chaohusaurus, a small variety of ichthyosaur, described in PLOS ONE.1 The fossils came from a rock formation...

Digging Into a Fossil Outhouse by Tim Clarey, Ph.D. * A group of paleontologists reported the discovery of concentrated fields of fossilized dung, called coprolite, in northwest Argentina.1 The closely-spaced dung piles are seen as evidence of gregarious behavior from large herbivores. However, does the great Flood provide a better explanation? Eight separate dung heaps were located within an area of about three square miles in La Rioja Province, each containing hundreds to thousands of coprolites with an average density of about 80 coprolites per square yard.1 The dung concentrations were spaced about a mile apart, and each covered an...

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...