Free Republic

Bending the Branches October 18, 2006 A new study of human fossils asks, what if we are the odd ones? (Washington University, St. Louis) Most people think of humans as the top, the apex of the family tree. But new research suggests this quintessentially human infatuation with ourselves may have impaired our judgment. Erik Trinkaus, a paleontologist and Neandertal expert at Washington University in St. Louis, believes that modern human features are unusual enough, compared with ancestral members of the genus Homo, to make us a side branch of the family tree. Neanderthals have generally been seen as evolutionary outcasts,...

Mastodons Driven to Extinction by Tuberculosis, Fossils Suggest Kimberly Johnson for National Geographic News October 3, 2006 Tuberculosis was rampant in North American mastodons during the late Ice Age and may have led to their extinction, researchers say. Mastodons lived in North America starting about 2 million years ago and thrived until 11,000 years ago—around the time humans arrived on the continent—when the last of the 7-ton (6.35-metric-ton) elephantlike creatures died off. Scientists Bruce Rothschild and Richard Laub pieced together clues to the animals' widespread die-off by studying unearthed mastodon foot bones. Rothschild first noticed a telltale tuberculosis lesion on...

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - Ethiopian scientists unveiled on Wednesday a 3.3 million-year-old fossil of a girl, which they believe is the most complete skeleton ever found. The fossil including an entire skull, torso, shoulder blade and various limbs was discovered at Dikaka, some 400 kms northeast of the capital Addis Ababa near the Awash river in the Rift Valley. "The finding is the most complete hominid skeleton ever found in the world," Zeresenay Alemseged, head of the Paleoanthropological Research Team, told a news conference. He said the fossil was older than the 3.2 million year old remains of "Lucy" discovered...

The 3.3-million-year-old fossilised remains of a human-like child have been unearthed in Ethiopia's Dikika region. The female bones are from the species Australopithecus afarensis , which is popularly known from the adult skeleton nicknamed "Lucy". Scientists are thrilled with the find, reported in the journal Nature. They believe the near-complete remains offer a remarkable opportunity to study growth and development in an important extinct human ancestor. The skeleton was first identified in 2000, locked inside a block of sandstone. It has taken five years of painstaking work to free the bones. "The Dikika fossil is now revealing many secrets about...

Link only to "Great Falls Tribune"

PETERSBURG, Ky. - Like most natural history museums, this one has exhibits showing dinosaurs roaming the Earth. Except here, the giant reptiles share the forest with Adam and Eve. That, of course, is contradicted by science, but that's the point of the $25 million Creation Museum rising fast in rural Kentucky. Its inspiration is the Bible — the literal interpretation that contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago. "If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that's our presupposition or axiom, and we...

Scientists have extracted intact bone marrow from the fossilized remains of 10-million-year-old frogs and salamanders. The finding, detailed in the August issue of the journal Geology, is the first case of fossilized bone marrow ever to be discovered and only the second report of fossilized soft tissue. In June of 2005, scientists announced they had found preserved red blood cells from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone. "It pushes back the boundary for how far [soft tissue] fossilization can go," said study leader Maria McNamara of University College Dublin in Ireland. Why it matters Preserved soft tissue could provide insight into...

UK scientists have traced the history of wildfires by studying lumps of ancient charcoal from around the world. The fossils show the incidence of fires through time is closely related to the level of atmospheric oxygen. Andrew Scott and Ian Glasspool say huge swathes of the planet were ablaze when concentrations of the gas peaked some 275 million years ago. Their research is published in the US scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "People might think the charcoal they pull out of a bonfire is just rubbish; but look at it under a microscope and you see...

SYDNEY, Australia — Before there were cuddly koalas, hoards of flesh-eating kangaroos, "demon ducks," and marsupial lions roamed Australia's Outback, according to recent fossil discoveries by paleontologists. A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales working in the eastern state of Queensland made the discoveries in three new fossil deposits during a recent two-week dig. Many of the fossils are older than 24 million years; one of the deposits is thought to contain fossils up to 500 million years old, according to Prof. Mike Archer, the university's dean of science. A saber-toothed kangaroo and a giant 10-foot-tall,...

SYDNEY (July 12) - Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. A team of Australian paleontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom." A University of New South Wales team said the fearsome fossils were among 20 previously unknown species uncovered at a site in northwest Queensland state. Professor Michael Archer said on Wednesday the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolf-like fangs were found as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo. "Because they didn't hop, these were...

SYDNEY, Australia - Forget cute, cuddly marsupials. Paleontologists say they have found the fossilized remains of a fanged killer kangaroo and what they describe as a "demon duck of doom." A University of New South Wales team said the fearsome fossils were among 20 previously unknown species uncovered at a site in Australia's northwest Queensland state. Professor Michael Archer said Wednesday that the remains of a meat-eating kangaroo with wolflike fangs were found, as well as a galloping kangaroo with long forearms that could not hop like a modern kangaroo. "Because they didn't hop, these were galloping kangaroos, with big,...

Scientists went to work digging for fossils at La Brea Tar Pits, digging the tooth of a 5-foot (1.5-meter) dire wolf and the toe of a sabertooth tiger from the sticky prehistoric asphalt near downtown Los Angeles. About 10,000 years before the arrival of mammoth traffic jams in the second-largest U.S. city, the two beasts likely got stuck in the goo while hunting a camel, horse or ground sloth, said John Harris, chief curator and head of vertebrate studies at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, which oversees the site. ''It's one of the, if not the, richest...

WASHINGTON -- The best evidence yet for the oldest life on Earth is found in odd-shaped, rock-like mounds in Australia that are actually fossils created by microbes 3.4 billion years ago, researchers report. "It's an ancestor of life. If you think that all life arose on this one planet, perhaps this is where it started," said Abigail Allwood, a researcher at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology and lead author of the new study. It appears Thursday in the journal Nature. The strange geologic structures - which range from smaller than a fingernail to taller than a man - are exactly...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters marched Saturday through Manhattan to demand an immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq just hours after an American soldier died in a roadside explosion in Baghdad -- the 70th U.S. fighter killed in that country this month. "End this war, bring the troops home," read one of the many signs lifted by marchers on a sunny afternoon three years after the war in Iraq began. The mother of a Marine killed two years ago in Iraq held a picture of her son, born in 1984 and killed 20 years...

In a new book about evolution, the story of the race to find fossils of the ultimate human ancestor intertwines with a human story of the single-minded dedication and competitiveness of the fossil hunters themselves. Ann Gibbons, author of "The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors," will give a free lecture next week at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Since 1990, she has covered human evolution for the journal Science, giving her what she called "a ringside seat" to follow the discoveries as they happened and the scientists who made them. "These people have this grand...

The gateway between the Atlantic and Pacific at the bottom of the globe opened up 41 million years ago, according to a study of old fish teeth. The research in Science pushes back the date of the forging of Drake Passage to twice as long ago as once thought. US geologists believe it kick-started the ocean current that swirls around Antarctica, helping to bring about a dramatic cooling effect. The continent was transformed from lush forest to the icy landscape of today.

Recently I highlighted how the coverage of Tiktaalik revealed the fascinating phenomenon that only after discovering a new "missing link" will evolutionists acknowledge the previously paltry state of fossil evidence for evolution. This behavior is again witnessed in coverage of the discovery of Australopithecus anamensis fossils in Ethiopia. The media has also exaggerated and overblown claims that this evidence supports "human evolution." The latest "missing link" is actually comprised of a few tooth and bone fragments of Au. anamensis, an ape-like species that lived a little over 4 million years ago. Incredibly, claims of "intermediacy" are based upon 2-3 fragmented...

See for example this thread first. While digging in a Swedish Berm they found fossil sh*t from a worm But like a missing link, will this find raise a stink? It's bound to make some people...squirm!

Close window Published online: 5 April 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060403-7 The fish that crawled out of the waterA newly found fossil links fish to land-lubbers.Rex Dalton The fossilized remains of Tiktaalik show a crocodile-like creature with joints in its front arms. credit Ted Daeschler A crucial fossil that shows how animals crawled out from the water, evolving from fish into land-loving animals, has been found in Canada. The creature, described today in Nature1,2, lived some 375 million years ago. Palaeontologists are calling the specimen from the Devonian a true 'missing link', as it helps to fill in a gap in...

There's a couple of problems with this "missing link" that recent articles have been promoting. Some of the articles also mention this new "link" is "like Archaeopteryx, the famous fossil that bridged the gap between reptiles and birds." Here's the problem with these fossils labeled as "transitionals" : It has long been predicted that fossils should reveal many organisms “in transition” between different types. What the record does reveal is a history of mass extinctions and sudden appearances of new complex types. After each extinction (brought about by various mechanisms such as impact events), hundreds and sometimes thousands of life...