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The fossilized Borealopelta markmitchelli, nodosaur for short, is so well preserved evidence of the animal’s last meal remains in its gut. On March 21, 2011, mining machine operator Shawn Funk at the Suncor Millennium Mine in Alberta, Canada, spotted some unusual rock formations that he suspected could contain fossils. Since a bunch of plesiosaur and ichthyosaur remains had been previously excavated from the region, Donald Henderson, who is the curator of dinosaurs at Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Canada, and a crew were sent to the mine to investigate. Henderson and his colleagues at first were baffled by the fossils,...

Everyone knows you have to watch out for sharks on Australian beaches – but what about dinosaurs? A 130-million year old dinosaur footprint has been found among the seaweed and surf on popular Cable Beach near the town of Broome, Western Australia. Bindi Lee Porth said she was collecting seashells when she felt an indent in the sand. Clearing it away, she found a number of massive, preserved footprints.

Should We Drop the Term 'Living Fossil'? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * › Fossils Show Stasis and No Transitional Forms Mark Carnall at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History recently wrote an article for the UK newspaper The Guardian. He argues that we should stop using the term "living fossil."1 What does his argument reveal about evolutionary thinking? Charles Darwin first used the phrase in the Origin of Species to describe life forms that look essentially the same today as their fossil versions, even though their fossils are absent from intervening rock layers.

A glyptodont shell found in Carlos Spegazzini, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina on December 29, 2015 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A passer-by on Christmas Day found a meter-long shell on a riverbank in Argentina which may be from a glyptodont, a prehistoric kind of giant armadillo, experts said Tuesday. A local man thought the black scaly shell was a dinosaur egg when he saw it lying in the mud, his wife Reina Coronel told AFP. Her husband Jose Antonio Nievas found the shell beside a stream at their farm in Carlos Spegazzini, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of the capital Buenos Aires. "My...

India would reject a deal to combat climate change that includes a pledge for the world to wean itself off fossil fuels this century, a senior official said, underlying the difficulties countries face in agreeing how to slow global warming. Almost 200 nations will meet in the French capital on Nov. 30 to try and seal a deal to prevent the planet from warming more than the 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say is vital if the world is to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change. To keep warming in check, some countries want the Paris agreement to...

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Saturday called for Republicans to abandon the corrupting influence of the Koch brothers and other wealthy energy magnates. "This is a party that rejects science and refuses to understand that climate change is real," he said of GOP during the annual Blue Jamboree in North Charleston, S.C. "I understand if you stand up to the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry, that you'll lose your campaign contributions," the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate added. "[Climate change] is already causing devastating problems all over this world. To hell with the fossil fuel industry. Worry more about...

Compilation: Fossil Fuels, LNG, What's the facts? Jacki Daily Show! On this episode of the Jacki Daily Show, Jacki is joined by Anne Korin the co-author of Petropoly. .Moral Case for Fossil Fuels; Restricting Them Means Loss of Human Life – Ethanol Mandate Kills JobsInterviews include Alex Epstein, Author of the Moral Case for Fossil Fuels . Jim Amos, Chairman of Proctor & Gamble's Franchising Division . "Switch” the movie – Can we switch from fossil fuels to renewables? UPDATED – Scott Tinker talks world population growth and the energy mix that will meet its demand over the next decades.

Two hundred and seventy-eight million years ago, the world was a different place. Not only were the landmasses merged into the supercontinent of Pangaea, but the land was home to ancient animals unlike anything alive today. But until now, very little information was available about what animals were present in the southern tropics. In a study published in Nature Communications, scientists from The Field Museum and colleagues from around the world describe several new amphibian species and a reptile from northeastern Brazil that help fill this key geographic gap and reveal how animals moved among regions in the supercontinent. "Almost...

Skeleton of the Cretaceous mammal Spinolestes with preserved fur shadows. The outer ear can be seen at the upper edge of the photo (arrow). During preparation, the skeleton was transferred to a plastic matrix. Credit: Georg Oleschinski. With permission of Nature Publishing Group ====================================================================================================================== The discovery of a new 125-million-year-old fossil mammal in Spain has pushed back the earliest record of preserved mammalian hair structures and inner organs by more than 60 million years. The specimen, named Spinolestes xenarthrosus, was fossilized with remarkably intact guard hairs, underfur, tiny hedgehog-like spines and even evidence of a fungal hair infection. The unusually...

President Barack Obama’s enemies have long accused him of waging a “war on coal.” But a very different war on oil and gas is coming next. The newest phase of Obama’s environmental agenda has the oil and natural gas industry in its crosshairs, with plans to curb greenhouse gas pollution from rigs and refineries, tighten oversight of drilling on public lands and impose a strict ozone limit that industry lobbyists slam as “the most expensive regulation ever.”

Hallucigenia sparsa from the Burgess Shale (Royal Ontario Museum 61513). The fossil is 15 mm long. Credit: Jean-Bernard Caron A new study of an otherworldly creature from half a billion years ago - a worm-like animal with legs, spikes and a head difficult to distinguish from its tail - has definitively identified its head for the first time, and revealed a previously unknown ring of teeth and a pair of simple eyes. The results, published today in the journal Nature, have helped scientists reconstruct what the common ancestor of everything from tiny roundworms to huge lobsters might have looked like....

Almost 70 Oxford alumni have symbolically handed back their degrees to criticise the university’s weak policy on fossil fuels investment – which excludes only direct investment in oil sands and coal but fails to address other money invested in unsustainable sources of energy. Oxford University announced last week it would maintain its position of not having direct investment in high-risk oil sands and coal; it also pledged to follow environmental and social criteria for its investment. However, many have noted this policy does not go far enough, since it doesn’t rule out investment in all dirty energy sources. As a...

Independent U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-described socialist and one of the most outspoken liberals in Congress, will seek the 2016 Democratic nomination for president, he told U.S. media on Wednesday. "I believe (voters) want a fundamental change so that government works for ordinary Americans and not just billionaires," Sanders told USA Today. He said he would make the announcement official on Thursday. Sanders also told the Associated Press in an interview he was running for president. With former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton looming as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2016, few other candidates have...

NEW YORK – A fragment of jaw bone dating back 2.8 million years is evidence that the first humans evolved more than 400,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists reported Wednesday. The fossil, which was uncovered in the Afar region in northern Ethiopia, is dated very close to the time that the human, or "Homo" genus, or group, split away from more ape-like ancestors like Australopithecus afarensis, best known for the fossil skeleton Lucy discovered in 1974.

“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...