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A House Judiciary subcommittee is investigating the finances of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, whose chairman, Mary Frances Berry, is in a dispute over whether her term ends this week or next month.     "We are looking into management, financials, contracting ...," confirmed Mindy Barry, oversight counsel for the Constitution, civil rights and property rights subcommittee, which has authorized but not yet used a subpoena to obtain the needed information.     The subpoena seeks "all documents referring to all contracts, specifically dealings with [public relations firms] McKinney and Associates and McKinney and McDowell; all documents regarding any fees paid to...

Link post: use the link to go to the thread with the pictures in the Chat section, where any discussion and comments should be posted: Geology Pictures of the Week, November 14-20, 2004: Student Fossil Find & Eiger View

Linked article is about this. Here's the interesting excerpt: "Paleontologists are hailing the discovery by a first-year geology student of a new species of amphibian, a salamander-like creature that lived 300 million years ago. -- Adam Striegel picked up a rock the size of a baseball along a road near Pittsburgh International Airport. He decided to show it to one of his lecturers, Charles Jones. Jones spotted some teeth and the outline of a skull. -- "It was immediately clear that this was rare," said Jones." And one of my favorite mountains (not a volcano: click for full-size version):

Blacksburg, Va., November 3, 2004 -- In 1998, Shuhai Xiao and colleagues reported finding thousands of 600-million-year-old embryo microfossils in the Neoproterozoic Doushantuo Formation, a fossil site near Weng''an, South China (Xiao, S., Zhang, Y., and Knoll, A.H., 1998, "Three-dimensional preservation of algae and animal embryos in a Neoproterozoic phosphorite," Nature, v. 391). Within the egg cases they examined at that time, they discovered animals in the first stages of development - from a single cell to only a few dozen cells. "The cellular preservation is amazing," said Xiao, assistant professor of geosciences in the College of Science at Virginia...

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...

Published online: 07 July 2004 Michael HopkinFossil findings blur picture of art's birthWho created the earliest artwork? Artworks from Germany were found alongside human remains. For years archaeologists have clung to the idea that only truly modern humans were artists, and that our Neanderthal cousins spent their entire evolutionary lifetime as boorish philistines. But fresh analysis of a prized set of human bones has dealt a body blow to this cherished theory. The first sparks of artistic creativity are seen in carved figurines found at various sites throughout Europe. The oldest examples are between 30,000 and 40,000 years old, which...

Do Fossils Show a Worldwide Record of Evolution?   05/21/2004 The fossil record is the acid test of evolutionary theory.  Everyone who walks a dog knows that small-scale variation occurs among living species, but non-evolutionists get understandably annoyed when Darwinians extrapolate the observed variations to encompass all of life: as if to say, because finch beaks vary, therefore humans had bacteria ancestors.  Darwin’s bold hypothesis connected all living things into a branching tree of life.  He claimed that, ultimately, whales and oaks and kangaroos and seashells could trace their ancestry to single-celled organisms.  The only way to connect this hypothesis to...

Fossil Hummingbird, Arthropod Look Modern    05/07/2004Science announced that a rare hummingbird fossil has been found in Germany and, though assumed to be 30 million years old, is indistinguishable from living New-World hummingbirds (the standard theory has been that hummingbirds evolved in the New World only).  Writing in the May 7 issue,1 discoverer Gerald Mayr said, I report on tiny skeletons of stem-group hummingbirds from the early Oligocene of Germany that are of essentially modern appearance and exhibit morphological specializations toward nectarivory and hovering flight.  These are the oldest fossils of modern-type hummingbirds, which had not previously been reported from...

The catastrophe that extinguished the dinosaurs and other animal species, 65 million years ago also brought dramatic changes to the vegetation. In a study presented in latest issue of the journal Science, the paleontologists Vivi Vajda from the University of Lund, Sweden and Stephen McLoughlin from the Queensland University of Technology, Australia have described what happened to the vegetation month by month. They depict a world in darkness where the fungi had taken over. It´s known that an asteroid hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico at the end of the Cretaceous Period. It left a 180 km wide crater and...

Those on-the-prowl Mars robots -- Spirit and Opportunity -- are sending back extraordinary images and science data about the red planet and its history of climate and water. Both rovers have found evidence of water at their respective landing sites. But the question remains open as to whether Mars was, or is today, a planet capable of supporting life. The tell-tale clues of water left behind hint that some spots on Mars did have a persistent wet look that might have been sociable to extraterrestrial creatures. While Mars scientists have their eyes focused on finding tiny microbes, the question remains:...

Anthropologists Hail Romania Fossil Find Sat Mar 6,11:27 AM ET By ALISON MUTLER, Associated Press Writer BUCHAREST, Romania - Experts analyzing remains of a man, woman and teenage boy unearthed in Romania last year are convinced that the 35,000 year-old fossils are the most complete ever of modern humans of that era, a U.S. scientist said Saturday. International scientists have been carrying out further analysis to get a clearer picture on the find, said anthropologist Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis. But it's already clear that, "this is the most complete collection of modern humans in Europe older...

A tiny fossil discovered in the 1920s and then largely ignored has been identified as the oldest known insect, scientists report. The discovery pushes back the origins of Earth's most prolific life form some 20 million years. The new analysis of the 400-million-year-old specimen also suggests that it may have had wings, hinting that winged insects -- and insects in general -- arose much earlier than had been presumed. Encased in translucent rock called chert, the fossil is about an eighth of an inch square and reveals a pair of triangular jaws that are strikingly similar to those found only...

Source: University Of Michigan Date: 2004-01-19 Burning Fossil Fuels Has A Measurable Cooling Effect On The Climate Atmospheric researchers have provided observational evidence that burning fossil fuels has a direct impact on the solar radiation reflectivity of clouds, thereby contributing to global climate change. Joyce Penner, professor in the University of Michigan Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences, U-M graduate student Yang Chen, and assistant professor Xiquan Dong from the University of North Dakota Department of Atmospheric Science, reported their findings in the Jan. 15 issue of the journal Nature. Most evidence that increased levels of fossil fuel particles...

Tiny fossil found to have the world's oldest known penis By Steve Connor 05 December 2003 A tiny fossil of a creature that lived some 425 million years ago has entered the record books as the oldest unequivocally male animal. The organism, which resembles a cross between a shrimp and a clam, sports a large penis which has been perfectly preserved in three dimensions. David Siveter, professor of palaeontology at Leicester University, said there was no doubt the fossilised creature was a male, making it the oldest unambiguous member of its sex. Professor Siveter said the fossil was found at...

Fossil hints at primate origins The bone is just over a centimetre long An ankle bone discovered in central Burma could be evidence of an ancient ancestor common to many of today's primates, including humans. The 45-million-year-old fossil has features that link it to all of the anthropoids, the grouping of human-like species such as apes and monkeys. If correct, this would tie their line of evolutionary descent to Asia and not Africa as some have suggested. The findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The PNAS journal presents a paper on the discovery by Laurent...

Potholers uncover 35,000-year-old human jawbone Scientists believe a 35,000-year-old jawbone may be the oldest relic of modern human ancestors discovered in Europe. The fossil was found by potholers in a cave once used by hibernating bears in Romania's Carpathian Mountains. Experts dated it to between 34,000 and 36,000 years ago - a period during which early modern humans co-existed with the last of the Neanderthals. Other bones from the same cave - a skull fragment, a facial skeleton and a partial brain case - are still undergoing analysis, but thought to be the same age. Professor Erik Trinkaus, from Washington...

The discovery of the world's oldest genitals proves that little has changed over the last 400 million years - at least for daddy-long-legs. Fossils of harvestmen arachnids (Opiliones) have been found by palaeontologists in an ancient rock at Rhynie near Aberdeen in Scotland. Preserved within a male is a penis two-thirds the length of his body, and on a female there is a long egg-laying organ known as an ovipositor. The organs are remarkably similar to those in modern-day species of harvestmen. Dubbed daddy-long-legs along with crane flies, harvestmen are not formally classified as spiders because they do not spin...

With both sides clashing over the definition of "Native American," an appeals court heard arguments Wednesday on whether a 9,300-year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man belongs to scientists or Indian tribes. The Interior Department has been fighting with scientists over control of the bones since they were discovered in 1996 along the banks of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Wash. Anthropologists want to do research on the skeleton. But then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt ruled three years ago the bones should be handed over to the tribes for reburial. Last October, U.S. Magistrate John Jelderks overturned Babbitt and approved research on...

<p>George F. Will, the respected dean of Washington conservative columnists, has written a singularly dyspeptic column on the California recall election. He advises truly conservative Californians to "vote against the recall to protest its plebiscitary cynicism (and as a precaution find a conservative candidate from the list)." He goes on to hope for Governor Davis to be muscled into resignation, which, Mr. Will theorizes, might "deflate" the recall and permit Lt. Gov. Bustamante to become both acting and then actual governor -- with all the problems that will entail. This, Mr. Will suggests, would be "condign punishment" for the Democratic Party.</p>

Archaeologists are carrying out one of their most delicate projects to date - the careful restoration of 1200-year-old human faeces. Measuring 20cm by 5cm, the exhibit is thought to be the largest fossilised human excrement ever found. But despite surviving for well over 1,000 years, the Viking relic was broken into three pieces during a recent school visit to its home, the Archaeological Resource Centre (Arc) in York. Now team member Gill Snape, a student from the University of Bradford, has the unenviable task of restoring the artefact to its former glory. But despite admitting she has "never done anything...