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A University of Pittsburgh freshman geology student on a field trip stumbled across the fossil of an oversized, salamander-like creature with vicious crocodile-like teeth that lived about 300 million years ago, paleontologists said. The student picked up the softball-sized rock containing the fossil on a visit to a fresh road cut near Pittsburgh International Airport, and thinking it was of little interest, threw it aside. On a walk back through the same area, he picked up the object again and showed it to class lecturer Charles Jones. Jones spotted the teeth first, then the outline of a skull. "It was...

I was having an argument with another FReeper about how many of the old timers were still around. I tell people there is a FReeper vsyndrome and that most of them are still around, they just don't post much anymore. Here is your chance to put these rumours to rest. Chime in and let everyone know you still are alive and kicking. Post your registration number if you know it.

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...

Jan. 27, 2004 — In a prehistoric battle for survival, Neanderthals had to compete against modern humans and were wiped off the face of the Earth, according to a new study on life in Europe from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago. The findings, compiled by 30 scientists, were based on extensive data from sediment cores, archaeological artifacts such as fossils and tools, radiometric dating, and climate models. The collected information was part of a project known as Stage 3, which refers to the time period analyzed. The number three also seems significant in terms of why the Neanderthals became extinct....

LONDON (Reuters) - A huge find of fossils in Eastern England has revealed a pre-glacial period when the area basked in temperatures now more closely associated with the African savannah, scientists said on Thursday. The bones of seven-ton hippos half as big again as today's descendants have been found alongside those of horses, hyenas, deer, primitive mammoths, rodents and plants giving an unprecedented insight into the distant past. "This is a very significant find," said palaeontologist Simon Parfitt at London's Natural History Museum. "The site is unique in that we have this huge variety of different species all perfectly preserved."...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A tiny pre-human who lived more than 900,000 years ago in what is now Kenya may have been a "short experiment" in evolution that never quite made it, scientists said on Thursday. The little skull clearly belongs to an adult and was found last summer at a site where much larger hominids classified as Homo erectus lived, said Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution (news - web sites) and colleagues. He or she died on a volcanic ridge, perhaps mauled by a lion or other carnivore, Potts said. It is the smallest adult fossil found dating back...

Newly discovered fossils from China seem to be the oldest multi-celled animals yet found that were complex enough to have a two-sided body plan rather than a round one. The report on the creatures, published online Friday by the journal Science, is the latest in a series of fossil finds that downplays a supposed surge of species and diversity in body styles believed to have happened rather suddenly 540 million years ago. The episode, known as the Cambrian explosion, has been generating controversy for more than a century because it marked the point in pre-history where fossils for virtually all...

Another species has been added to the family tree of early human ancestors — and to controversies over how straight or tangled were the branches of that tree. Long before Homo erectus, Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy, more than three million years ago) and several other distant kin, scientists are reporting today, there lived a primitive hominid species in what is now Ethiopia about 5.5 million to 5.8 million years ago. That would make the newly recognizied species one of the earliest known human ancestors, perhaps one of the first to emerge after the chimpanzee and human lineages diverged from a common...

Footprints of Paleothic Man Found on Cheju Island By Han Eun-jung Footprints of a Paleolithic man, the first to be found in Asia, and fossilized animal tracks dating back to about 50,000 years ago were discovered on Cheju Island, the Cultural Properties Administration said at a press briefing in Seoul on Friday. More than 100 footprints of ancient man and thousands of horse, elephant, bird and deer fossil tracks were found in Namcheju-gun on the southern island province of Cheju and along the shores of the island's Andok-myon. The fossils were discovered by Professor Kim Jung-yul of the Korean National...

The Wyalusing Rocks were supposed to be just a scenic stop on Jennifer Elick's drive to Tuckhannock, where she and other Pennsylvania geologists planned to meet. But then a spot of white caught Elick's eye in the red sandstone of those Bradford County cliffs. "I thought to myself, 'Well, that's either a fossil, a fish fossil, or it's bird doo,'" said Elick, an assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences at Susquehanna University. "I reached up, grabbed it and looked at it, and it had teeth. It was a jaw, and it filled the palm of my hand, and was...

Mammoth herds 'roamed fertile Bering Strait in Ice Age' Huge herds of mammoth, wild horses and bison once roamed the land bridge between North America and Siberia, new evidence suggests. Plant fossils have shown that 24,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, dry grassland covered much of region. The vegetation would have allowed large populations of mammals to survive all year round on the now-submerged landmass known as Beringia or the Bering Strait. Scientists writing in the journal Nature said the animals would have been sustained by a diet rich in prairie sage, bunch grasses, and other grass-like plants....

Blacksburg, Va., September 18, 2003 -- Billions of years ago, there was a lot more greenhouse gas than today, and that was a good thing – else the Earth might be an icy ball. How much greenhouse gas was there in the ancient atmosphere? A 1993 model by Jim Kasting of Pennsylvania State University estimates that carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the Earth's early atmosphere must have been 10 times to as much as 10,000 times today's level, in order to compensate for the young (and fainter) sun. Now, a measurement of the fossil record using a new instrument...

Think the rodents you've seen in movies are scary? Scientists who've analyzed the fossilized remains of an extinct South American relative of guinea pigs say that the ancient bruisers were as large as bison. HIDE THE CHEESE. A bison-size rodent, Phoberomys pattersoni, grazed on aquatic grasses and roamed the riverbanks of ancient Venezuela about 8 million years ago.C.L. Cain/Science Researchers first described Phoberomys pattersoni in 1980 but until recently had only bone fragments and isolated teeth to study. Despite that limitation, scientists suspected that the animals were huge, says Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra, a paleontologist at the University of Tübingen in...

While spores dating back about 475 million years had already been found, it had not been proven whether they came from land or aquatic plants. In the new study, the spores were found with the spore sac that produced them, indicating they came from a land-based plant, said study author Charles Wellman of the University of Sheffield in England. The oldest fossils of land plants themselves are about 425 million years old and the age discrepancy between the oldest spores and the oldest fossils has puzzled scientists, Wellman said. "Now, we've actually got the spores in the plants," said Wellman,...

News in Science 18/4/2003 Ancient dung reveals a picture of the past [This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s833847.htm] An arctic mound of soil covering a core of solid ice in northeastern Siberia (Pic: Science) The successful dating of the most ancient genetic material yet may allow scientists to use preserved DNA from sources such as mammoth dung to help paint a picture of past environments. An international research effort led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark reports in today?s issue of the journal Science it has extracted well preserved animal and plant DNA from...

DENVER, Colo. --- How will global warming affect life on Earth? Uncertainties about future climate change and the impact of human activity make it difficult to predict exactly what lies ahead. But the past offers clues, say scientists who are studying a period of warming that occurred about 55 million years ago.In a joint project of the University of Michigan, the University of New Hampshire and the Smithsonian Institution, researchers have been analyzing fossils from the badlands of Wyoming found in a distinctive layer of bright red sedimentary rock that was deposited at the boundary between the Paleocene and Eocene...

Chinese Fossil Bed Astounds Paleontologists   02/21/2003 The Feb. 20 issue of Nature has a review article on the rich and well-preserved Cretaceous fossils in Liaoning province, China, dubbed the Jehol Biota.  The beds of volcanic tuff were so ideal for fossil preservation, they contain soft tissue impressions of feathers, fur, and stomach contents.  An abundance of dinosaurs, birds, mammals, fish, insects, amphibians, conifers and flowering plants are well represented, sometimes with 3D impressions and some with hundreds of specimens of certain species in one spot.  Famous dinosaurs found in the area include tyrannosaurids, titanosaurian sauropods, velociraptors, ankylosaurs and ceratopians.  Also...

Monkey or man? Toumai, hailed as our oldest ancestor, is stirring ancient scientific rivalries Palaeontologists are going to war over whether bones discovered in African desert are of an ape or a proto-human James Meek, science correspondent Thursday October 10, 2002 The Guardian As he awoke on his last day on earth, it is unlikely Toumai thought about much more than how he would survive the following hour - let alone that, 7m years later, a bunch of ape-like creatures would be furiously discussing how much they resembled him. Today, three months after the sensational announcement in Britain's leading scientific...

Ottawa, Ontario, Canada author Clive Douglas Campbell and Phoenix, Arizona, USA publisher Selah Publishing Group are pleased to announce the release of Messiah: 2030. Nobody knows the day and hour of the Second Coming, but the following years are on the front cover: Messiah: 2030 Cluny: 1030 Jesus: 30 David: 970 Abraham: 1970 Noah: 2970 Adam: 3970 Messiah: 2030 claims the Bible prophesies a sixth Arab-Israeli war will be over in 2003 and include the following: --the Palestinians will be deported to Jordan --Israel will go to war with Jordan, possess Jordanian land east of the Jordan River and King...