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Cast a net back 450 million years ago to the Ordovician Era, and you wouldn’t capture anything more than the ancestors of millipedes and worms. However, you might notice tall 29-feet-tall (8 meters) trunks without branches or leaves, towering over a landscape of newly-evolved vascular plants. These trunks, which have been found as fossils all over the world, are now strongly believed to be mushrooms—giant fungal towers that mean the kingdom of fungi produced the first giant land organism. The idea of a ‘fungal forest’ is one that’s often reproduced in fantasy and science-fiction writing. Mushrooms, for many, many reasons,...

What Happens If A Star Explodes Near The Earth?Veritasium | November 15, 2022

A brilliant burst of gamma rays may have caused a mass extinction event on Earth 440 million years ago—and a similar celestial catastrophe could happen again, according to a new study. Most gamma-ray bursts are thought to be streams of high-energy radiation produced when the core of a very massive star collapses. Such a disaster may have been responsible for the mass die-off of 70 percent of the marine creatures that thrived during the Ordovician period (488 to 443 million years ago), suggests study leader Brian Thomas, an astrophysicist at Washburn University in Kansas. The simulation also shows that a...

In a quest that has taken him from Oklahoma to Morocco and Poland, Brett has analyzed multiple examples of mass trilobite burial. A smothering death by tons of hurricane-generated storm sediment was so rapid that the trilobites are preserved in life position. These geologic "snapshots" record behavior in much the way that ancient Roman life was recorded at Pompeii by volcanic ash. Burial was rapid, Brett said, but also somewhat delicate. Trilobites, like other arthropods, shed their hard exoskeletons from time to time. "We find molted pieces lying immediately adjacent to each other," he said. "This is proof that the...

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....

New research from an international team of scientists is suggesting that instantly recognizable earthy smell after rain is released by bacteria trying to attract a particular arthropod as a way to spread its spores. The smell is a 500-million-year-old example of chemical communication, evolved to help a particular type of bacteria spread. Scientists have long been fascinated by the unique odor that appears when it rains. The scent is particularly prominent when the first rains of a season hit dry soil. Two Australian researchers named the odor petrichor, after an influential study in the 1960s suggested a particular oil is...

Trilobites are one of the most popular fossils for collectors and are found all over the world. The Ute Indians used one species as an amulet, and there is even a cave in France called the Grotte du Trilobite that contained a relic made out of one of these extinct marine creatures.1,2 Trilobites are members of the phylum Arthropoda, which includes spiders, insects, and crustaceans. Today, members of this group make up at least 85 percent of the species on Earth and live in every environment. Insects alone account for over 870,000 of these species.1 God designed all arthropods with...

German researcher Peter Jäger revealed earlier today that he's named a new Malaysian species of spider after David Bowie – the fetchingly titled Heteropoda Davidbowie. But what other animals have been named after famous music stars?

These weird creatures were found in an abandoned foundation pit in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

In a stunning example of evolution at work, scientists have now found that changes in a single gene can produce major changes in the skeletal armor of fish living in the wild. The surprising results, announced in the March 25, 2005, issue of journal Science, bring new data to long-standing debates about how evolution occurs in natural habitats. “Our motivation is to try to understand how new animal types evolve in nature,” said molecular geneticist David M. Kingsley, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Stanford University School of Medicine. “People have been interested in whether a few genes...

HORNY male trilobites may have been fighting it out over the females hundreds of millions of years ago, making them the earliest combatants known to take part in such sexual contests. Rob Knell, a biologist at Queen Mary University of London and Richard Fortey of London's Natural History Museum noticed that some of the trilobites in the museum's collection had horns on their heads similar to those of modern beetles. Male beetles use their horns to battle each other for supremacy, with the winner getting the opportunity to mate. Knell and Fortey wondered if the trilobites used their horns for...

Explosions In Space May Have Initiated Ancient Extinction On Earth Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a mass extinction on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago could have been triggered by a star explosion called a gamma-ray burst. The scientists do not have direct evidence that such a burst activated the ancient extinction. The strength of their work is their atmospheric modeling -- essentially a "what if" scenario. The scientists calculated that gamma-ray radiation from a relatively nearby star explosion, hitting the Earth for only ten seconds, could deplete up to half of the atmosphere's...

A trio of paleontologists has announced the discovery of a fossil belonging to a new species of ancient arthropod that rivals the largest ever found. They detail their finding in Wednesday's publication of the journal Nature. Hundreds of millions of years ago, arthropods, which include modern-day spiders, insects, and crustaceans, were much larger, and we're not talking the size of a small dog. An extinct millipede called Arthropleura reached up to 8.5 feet in length, making it the largest land invertebrate ever known to exist. Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, which extended 8.2 feet, dwelled in the water (pictured right).

Back when Wisconsin and western Russia once shared an address south of the equator, a violent collision in the asteroid belt blasted Earth with meteorites. The space rock smashup showered Earth with up to 100 times more meteorites than today's rate (a rock the size of a football field hits the planet about every 10,000 years). Yet, only a dozen or so impact craters have been found from the ancient bombardment 470 million years ago, during the Ordovician Period. Most are in North America, Sweden and western Russia. There are only about 185 known impact craters on Earth of any...

A DEVASTATING burst of gamma-rays may have caused one of Earth's worst mass extinctions, 443 million years ago. A team of astrophysicists and palaeontologists says the pattern of trilobite extinctions at that time resembles the expected effects of a nearby gamma-ray burst (GRB). Although other experts have greeted the idea with some scepticism, most agree that it deserves further investigation. GRBs are the most powerful explosions known. As giant stars collapse into black holes at the end of their lives, they fire incredibly intense pulses of gamma rays from their poles that can be detected even from across the universe...

A recent study suggests that the arrival of primitive moss-like plants 470 million years ago could have triggered a series of mini ice ages on Earth. Researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Oxford tried to explain how the first land plants could affect the climate about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. During the Ordovician Period, the planet witnessed a gradually cooling climate that led to a series of mini ice ages. Scientists believe that the global cooling was a result of a reduction in carbon levels in the atmosphere. The findings published in Nature Geoscience show...

The creatures, known as anomalocaridids, were already thought to be the largest animals of the Cambrian period, known for the "Cambrian Explosion" that saw the sudden appearance of all the major animal groups and the establishment of complex ecosystems about 540 to 500 million years ago. Fossils from this period suggested these marine predators grew to be about two feet long. Until now, scientists also thought these strange invertebrates -- which had long spiny head limbs presumably used to snag worms and other prey, and a circlet of plates around the mouth -- died out at the end of the...

The rise of the Appalachian Mountains may have caused a major ice age approximately 450 million years ago, an Ohio State University study has found. The weathering of the mountains pulled carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, causing the opposite of a greenhouse effect -- an "icehouse" effect. Scientists have suspected that our current ice age, which began 40 million years ago, was caused by the rise of the Himalayas. This new study links a much earlier major ice age --one that occurred during the Ordovician period -- to the uplift of the early Appalachians . It also reinforces the...