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Missing link feather fossils found in France By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 6:01pm GMT 20/02/2008 Primitive feathers that represent a key missing link in their evolution have been found, fossilised in 100-million-year-old amber from France. The fossils mark a step towards the shape of modern feathers As long as scientists have studied birds, they have puzzled over that most intricate of avian features - the feather. Because it is a marvellous feat of biological engineering, it has been siezed on by creationists trying to find evidence of designs that lie beyond the abilities of evolution. Scientists themselves have...

June 17, 2009—The fossil hand of a long-necked, ostrich-like dinosaur recently found in China may help solve the mystery of how bird wings evolved from dinosaur limbs, according to a new study. The ancient digits belonged to a 159-million-year-old theropod dinosaur dubbed Limusaurus inextricabilis. Theropods are two-legged dinos thought to have given rise to modern birds. Although it was a distant relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, the newfound dinosaur was a small herbivore, said study co-author James Clark, a biologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The animal was about 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) long and had relatively short, clawless...

Birds, more than any other group of animals, are a celebration of color. They have evolved to every extreme of the spectrum, from the hot pink of flamingos to the shimmering blue of a peacock’s neck. Yet, for decades, paleontologists who study extinct birds have had to use their imaginations to see the colors in the fossils. Several feather fossils have been unearthed over the years, but they have always been assumed to be colorless vestiges. Now a team of scientists has discovered color-producing molecules that have survived for 47 million years in the fossil of a feather. By analyzing...

A growing number of scientists seem finally ready to at least include intelligent design within the ‘range of views’ allowed to be heard.At first glance, the Potential and Limitations of Evolutionary Processes conference in Israel last week, which I attended, looked like any other scientific meeting on evolution, with talks by highly-credentialed scientists from institutions such as the Technical University of Munich, Cambridge, and the Weizmann Institute. But a closer look at the list of speakers shows that this one was different; it gave a platform to numerous notable proponents of intelligent design. The conference included chemistry Nobel prize winners...

Once you know the shape of the melanosomes in a fossil, you can learn all sorts of things about the animal. For example, some dinosaurs with fearsome reputations were incredibly showy. "Many of the close relatives of Velociraptor — you know, that was chasing the kids around in the kitchen [in "Jurassic Park"]?" Vinther said. "First of all, that was covered in feathers. It was really bird-like, not like this naked thing that we see there. But furthermore, most of the relatives that we looked at that were close to it, they were iridescent. So they would have had a...

A species of giant two-humped camel, Camelus knoblochi, is known to have lived for approximately a quarter of a million years in Central Asia. A new study in Frontiers in Earth Science shows that C. knoblochi's last refuge was in Mongolia until approximately 27,000 years ago. In Mongolia, the last of the species coexisted with anatomically modern humans and maybe the extinct Neanderthals or Denisovans. While the main cause of C. knoblochi's extinction seems to have been climate change, hunting by archaic humans may also have played a role. "Here we show that the extinct camel, Camelus knoblochi, persisted in...

Spider fossil under UV light. (Olcott et al., Communications Earth and Environment, 2022) =================================================================== 21 APRIL 2022 A fossilized spider that glows under ultraviolet light has given away the secret of its exceptional 23-million-year-long existence. When researchers placed the fossil and others like it under a fluorescent microscope on a whim, they were surprised to notice the subtle outline of the arachnids suddenly pop against their background. "To our surprise they glowed, and so we got very interested in what the chemistry of these fossils was that made them glow," explains geologist Alison Olcott from the University of Kansas. Analyses...

Artist reconstruction of Tupandactylus imperator. (Copyright Bob Nicholls 2022) For much of the history of paleontology, scientists thought all dinosaurs were covered in scales, like the lizards of today. That was until a spate of discoveries in recent decades revealed many of these marvelous extinct animals sported ancient feathers – just like their later descendants, birds. As for pterosaurs – the flying reptiles that reigned in the sky when the dinosaurs roamed – the issue has never been settled. Were they bald? Did they have feathers too? Scant evidence in the fossil record has never been definitive – until now,...

A hunter-gatherer who trekked through a desert oasis a hundred centuries ago left the continent’s most lasting impression: the oldest known human footprints in North America. There are only two of them — one left and one right — but the ancient traveler’s path through mineral-rich sediment in the Chihuahuan Desert allowed them to become enshrined in stone, and now dated, some 10,500 years later... The tracks were first discovered during highway construction in northeastern Mexico, about 300 kilometers from the Texas border, in 1961. They were excavated and taken to a local museum for study, but their precise location...

About 400 footprints were first discovered in the cave in 1965. Scientists initially attributed the impressions to a man, woman and child who lived 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. But radiocarbon measurements of two cave bear bones excavated just below the footprints now indicate that Homo sapiens made these tracks around 36,500 years ago, say anthropologist David Webb of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania and his colleagues. Analyses of 51 footprints that remain — cave explorers and tourists have destroyed the rest — indicate that six or seven individuals, including at least one child, entered the cave after a flood had...

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/2000-Year-Old-Roman-Childs-Footprints-Discovered-By-Archaeologists-In-North-Yorkshire/Article/201102315931164?f=rss Exclusive: Roman Child’s Footprints Found 4:38pm UK, Tuesday February 15, 2011 Gerard Tubb, north of England correspondent Two thousand-year-old footprints left by a Roman child playing by the side of a road have been found in North Yorkshire.

The oldest evidence of four-legged animals walking on land has been discovered in southeast Poland. Rocks from a disused quarry record the "footprints" of unknown creatures that lived about 397 million years ago. Scientists tell the journal Nature that the fossil trackways even retain the impressions left by the "toes" on the animals' feet. The team says the find means that land vertebrates appeared millions of years earlier than previously supposed. "This place has yielded what I consider to be some of the most exciting fossils I've ever encountered in my career as a palaeontologist," said team member Per Ahlberg...

While they may not have been the markings of a pair of Naot sandals, Israel Antiquities Authority conservators discovered footprints over 1,700 years-old, under the Lod Mosaic and at least one print resembling a modern sandal. Head of the Israel Antiquities AuthorityArt Conservation Branch Jacques Neguer said that when removing a section of a mosaic it is customary to clean its bedding, and study the material from which it is made and the construction stages and during that process, they found the footprints under the mosaic. "We look for drawings and sketches that the artists made in the plaster and...

The ancient footprints of the artisans who built a stunning 1,700-year-old mosaic floor in Lod were discovered recently, when conservators from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) were in the process of detaching the huge work of art from the ground. As the conservation experts worked on the plaster bedding to be done before detaching the mosaic, they were surprised to notice there were ancient foot and sandal prints beneath it. Clearly, the builders that had worked on the floor sometimes wore their sandals, and sometimes worked in their bare feet...

Footprints uncovered in Kenya show that as early as 1.5 million years ago an ancestral species, almost certainly Homo erectus, had already evolved the feet and walking gait of modern humans.

KATHMANDU (AFP) – A team of Japanese adventurers say they have discovered footprints they believe were made by the legendary yeti said to roam the Himalayan regions of Nepal and Tibet. "The footprints were about 20 centimetres (eight inches) long and looked like a human's," Yoshiteru Takahashi, the leader of the Yeti Project Japan, told AFP in Kathmandu on Monday. Takahashi was speaking after he returned with his seven-member team from their third attempt to track down the half-man-half-ape, tales of which have gripped the imaginations of Western adventurers and mountaineers for decades. Despite spending 42 days on Dhaulagiri IV...

Footprints in the ash By Sid PerkinsMay 29th, 2008Humans may have been walking around what is now central Mexico 40,000 years ago HUMAN PRINTSFootprints (one left) left in volcanic ash that fell in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin about 40,000 years could be evidence that humans have inhabited the Americas far longer than previously confirmed. Laser scans of the prints (right) confirm their human origins, the researchers report today at the American Geophysical Union meeting. Footprints left in volcanic ash that fell in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin about 40,000 years ago are evidence that humans have inhabited the Americas far longer...

A slab of North Texas limestone is on track to rock the world, with its two imbedded footprints poised to make a huge impression in scientific and religious circles. The estimated 140-pound stone was recovered in July 2000 from the bank of a creek that feeds the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, located about 53 miles south of Fort Worth. The find was made just outside Dinosaur Valley State Park, a popular destination for tourists known for its well-preserved dinosaur tracks and other fossils. The limestone contains two distinct prints – one of a human footprint and one belonging...

1m-years-old footprints found at Margalla Hills By Sher Baz Khan ISLAMABAD, July 27: In what appears to be a major discovery, archaeologists have found two over one million years old human footprints preserved on a sandstone at the Margalla Hills. The Indusians Research Cell, which is working under the supervision of world renowned archaeologist and historian Dr Ahmad Hassan Dani of Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisations, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad, has made the discovery, which is likely to add a new chapter to the archaeological history and heritage of the federal capital and attract visitors. A footprint of 1 feet is...

A BEACHCOMBER claims he has found ancient human footprints dating back 8,000 years, embedded in an ancient Welsh peat bed. Steve Maitland Thomas was walking on Kenfig Beach, Porthcawl, with his friend John Blundell, when they found a number of ancient size-eight footprints. He said, "We found the first on January 19, the day after storms had whipped up the sand revealing the bedrock below. The peat beds were formed from the floor of a vast forest, which once stretched right across the valley which now forms the Bristol Channel, until sea levels rose approximately 8,000 years ago." The next...