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NEW YORK (AP) -- Scientists have caught a fossil fish in the act of adapting toward a life on land, a discovery that sheds new light one of the greatest transformations in the history of animals. Scientists have long known that fish evolved into the first creatures on land with four legs and backbones more than 365 million years ago, but they've had precious little fossil evidence to document how it happened. The new find of several specimens looks more like a land-dweller than the few other fossil fish known from the transitional period, and researchers speculate that it may...

Scorpion bigger than human described Nov. 30, 2005 Courtesy Nature and World Science staff A geologist working in Scotland has uncovered footprints that he says come from a fearsome water scorpion bigger than a human. The Desert Hairy Scorpion Hadrurus arizonensis (Courtesy Imagers NASA Science Education) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The tracks were made about 330 million years ago by a six-legged creature called Hibbertopterus, according to Martin Whyte of the University of Sheffield, U.K. Hibbertopterus was some 1.6 metres (5¼ feet) long and a metre (3¼ feet) wide, he added. The tracks show that this now-extinct group of animals, previously thought to...

First Chimpanzee Fossils Cause Problems for Evolution by Fazale (Fuz) R. Rana, Ph.D.Where were you on September 1, 2005? Perhaps you missed the announcement of a scientific breakthrough: the influential journal Nature published the completed sequence of the chimpanzee genome.1This remarkable achievement received abundant publicity because it paved the way for biologists to conduct detailed genetic comparisons between humans and chimpanzees.2Unfortunately, the fanfare surrounding the chimpanzee genome overshadowed a more significant discovery. In the same issue, Nature published a report describing the first-ever chimpanzee fossils. This long-awaited scientific advance barely received notice because of the fascination with the chimpanzee genome....

I'm getting tired of this urban legend that Meister found human footprints with fossils. Stuff like this embarasses Christians and hurts intelligent design: **** (C) Glen J. Kuban, 1998 - 2005 According to Dr. Melvin Cook (1970), a local rockhound named William J. Meister was hunting for trilobite fossils along a hillside near Antelope Springs, Utah in 1968 when he broke open a slab and discovered a curious oblong marking that he took for a human sandal print. This was quite surprising, since the rock at this locality is identified as the middle Cambrian Wheeler Formation--over 500 million years old....

That’s a CROC !! A French-sponsored 12 member Peruvian exploration team has discovered the fossil remains of a 46 foot crocodile – deep in the Amazon jungle. It is believed the entire Amazon Basin was once an inland sea – stretching from Atlantic to Pacific, and inhabited by creatures such as this monster and a relatively demure and petite giant armadillo – whose fossil was also found nearby. The crocodile fossil, which included skeleton, jaws, and very large teeth , indicates the creature may have had a head measuring four feet across ; and it probably weighed “about 9 tons...

Ruby Washington/The New York TimesWayne G. Powell, chairman of the geology department at Brooklyn College, with the track of an Acrocanthosaurus, top, and a larger one from a Pleurocoelus. Scientists thought the block was a replica. Here is a good way to hide dinosaur tracks: Wait tens of millions of years while the footsteps fossilize under a shallow sea that will later become Texas, dig up the tracks just before World War II, put plaster around the sides, paint the whole thing a whimsical muddy red, take it to Brooklyn and bolt it to a classroom wall with an...

CHADRON, Neb. (AP) -- When three suspicious men were stopped on federal land in remote northwestern Nebraska in 2003, the U.S. Forest Service didn't take long to figure out what they were doing. The men had dug an 18-by-10-foot hole more than 2 feet deep, leaving the fossilized bones of a prehistoric rhinoceros exposed. Plaster used to take casts of the bones and excavating tools also were found. The men were poaching fossils -- a practice the Forest Service says has become rampant in recent years at Oglala National Grasslands. Although the men in this case were arrested and eventually...

A mysterious "monkey bone" which offers a link to Hartlepool's prehistoric past is now on show at a travelling museum of curiosities in the town. Rumours began to circulate that the bone found on the beach at Seaton Carew belonged to a monkey who, as legend has it, washed up in Hartlepool during the Napoleonic war and was executed as a French spy. Experts from the Department of Archaeology at the University of Durham and Tees Archaeology confirmed that the 30-cm long bone was in fact from a red deer. "We could tell straight away that the bone was ancient....

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A fossil found in South Dakota is that of a never before seen species of dinosaur, a horse-sized plant eater with spikes on its bony flat head, scientists said on Monday. "When my colleagues saw a CAT scan of the new fossil, they tore up their family tree diagrams and said, 'Back to the drawing board!' ... We never suspected such a creature existed," said palaeontologist Robert Bakker. Discovery of the flat-headed member of the pachycephalosaur family changes the view of dinosaur history during the final days of the Cretaceous Period 66 million years ago, showing that...

By Electa Draper Denver Post Staff Writer “Once a track is exposed, it’s like a ticking clock,” says Andre Delgalvis, a Grand Junction resident who has made some rare fossil finds on Lake Powell’s temporarily exposed shore. Bullfrog, Utah - Andre Delgalvis scrambles over new shoreline at Lake Powell and spies three-toed dinosaur tracks only recently exposed by plunging water levels at the desert reservoir.

After excavating a cache of Neandertal fossils about 100 years ago at Krapina Cave in what's now Croatia, researchers concluded that incisions on the ancient individuals' bones showed that they had been butchered and presumably eaten by their comrades. That claim has proved difficult to confirm. A new, high-tech analysis indicates that the Krapina Neandertals ritually dismembered corpses in ways that must have held symbolic meaning for the group-whether or not Neandertals ate those remains. Neandertals apparently possessed a facility for abstract thought that has often been regarded as unique to modern Homo sapiens, says study director Jill Cook of...

Fossil that stood 12 feet tall is far too ancient for carbon datingMOORPARK, CALIF. - The remarkably well-preserved remnants of an estimated half-million-year-old mammoth — including both tusks — were discovered at a new housing development in Southern California. An onsite paleontologist found the remains, which include 50 percent to 70 percent of the Ice Age creature, as crews cleared away hillsides to prepare for building, Mayor Pro Tem Clint Harper said. Paleontologist Mark Roeder estimated the mammoth was about 12 feet tall, Harper said. Roeder believed it was not a pygmy or imperial mammoth, but he had not yet...

The toothless skull of an early human ancestor, discovered in the Republic of Georgia, may attest to evolution's oldest known example of some kind of compassion for the elderly and handicapped in society, scientists are reporting today. Other experts agreed that the discovery was significant, but cautioned that it might be a stretch to interpret the fossil as evidence of compassion. The well-preserved skull belonged to a male Homo erectus about 40 years old. All his teeth, except the left canine, were missing. The empty tooth sockets had been filled in by a regrowth of bone, the scientists said, indicating...

Why is Garry Trudeau doing a "Doonesbury" sequence inspired by disgraced Republican-friendly reporter Jeff Gannon? "I'm not sure it's commonly understood to what lengths this administration is willing to go to bypass the 'filter,' as Bush calls the media," the cartoonist replied in an e-mail interview. "The president made it official Wednesday -- his Justice Department (news - web sites), fresh from signing off on torture, apparently thinks propaganda's OK too." When asked if he thought the press has underreported the Gannon episode, pundit payola, and other examples of media manipulation, Trudeau said: "It's not that it's been underreported so...

BANGKOK, Thailand: A Thai man who offered dinosaur fossils and valuable antiques for sale on the Internet has been arrested for illegally trading in ancient artifacts and art, police said Friday. Acting on a tip-off from U.S. authorities, undercover police arrested Piriya Wachachitphan, 25, on Monday and confiscated 108 large dinosaur fossils and five boxes containing smaller pieces from his home in Bangkok, said police Lt. Gen. Thani Somboonsab. "It is the first time that police have arrested a smuggler of dinosaur fossils in Thailand,'' he said. Police said Piriya had also sold more than 1,000 cultural artifacts, including Buddha...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A new species of crocodile which lived 40 million years ago has been discovered in tropical Australia, filling a gap in the evolution of the prehistoric-looking crocodile, researchers said on Thursday. Two nearly complete skulls and a lower jaw of a new species of crocodile that belonged to a group called Mekosuchinae were unearthed by miners in the northern state of Queensland, said Australia's Monash University researcher Lucas Buchanan. "There is a big gap from about 30 to 60 million years ago of which we have no clue, except for these guys," Buchanan told Reuters on Thursday....

History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries Luke Harding in Berlin Saturday February 19, 2005 The Guardian It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals. This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull....

NEW YORK (AP) -- A new analysis of bones unearthed nearly 40 years ago in Ethiopia has pushed the fossil record of modern humans back to nearly 200,000 years ago -- perhaps close to the dawn of the species. Researchers determined that the specimens are around 195,000 years old. Previously, the oldest known fossils of Homo sapiens were Ethiopian skulls dated to about 160,000 years ago. Genetic studies estimate that Homo sapiens arose about 200,000 years ago, so the new research brings the fossil record more in line with that, said John Fleagle of Stony Brook University in New York,...

A 65 million year old tsunami is still wreaking havoc in the scientific community, a New Mexico State University professor says. The 300-foot-tall tsunami - an aftereffect of the giant meteor impact that some scientists think killed off the dinosaurs - scrambled fossils and rock and has made the event very hard to date, said Timothy Lawton, head of NMSU's geology department.

In 1914, the U.S. Bureau of Mines predicted American oil reserves would last merely a decade. In both 1939 and 1951, the Interior Department estimated oil supply at only 13 years. "We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," declared Pres. Jimmy Carter gloomily in 1977. In fact, the earliest claim that we were running out of oil dates back to 1855 – four years before the first well was drilled! Still, with gasoline oil prices seemingly rocketing past the moon and towards Mars, and newly-published...