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Grand Canyon Gorge Is 9 Times Older Than Thought Hope Hamashige for National Geographic NewsApril 9, 2008 New research on the Grand Canyon challenges the long-held belief that the canyon was carved by the mighty Colorado River about six million years ago. Parts of the canyon were formed more than 50 million years earlier than previously thought, according to the new study. The newfound evidence, which will be presented in the May issue of the Geological Society of America Bulletin, shows that part of the canyon known as Upper Granite Gorge formed more than 55 million years ago. The history...

The Tibetan Plateau has gradually risen since the Indian plate collided with the Eurasian plate at about 55 Ma. Regardless of the debates over the rising process and elevation of the plateau, there is no doubt that the Himalayas have appeared as a mountain range since the Miocene, with the appearance of vegetation vertical zones following thereafter. Open grasslands per se have no direct relationship to elevation, because they can have different elevations in different regions of the world, having a distribution near the sea level to the extreme high plateaus. On the other hand, the southern margin of the...

Genetic evidence is shedding new light on the origins of horses in the New World, during a particularly hazy period in their evolution. As the Great Ice Age came to an end, some 11,000 years ago, North America was thought to be home to as many as 50 species and subspecies of horse. But studies of ancient DNA tell a rather different story, suggesting the horses belonged to just two species. These are the stilt-legged horses, now extinct, and the caballines. The caballines are thought to be the ancestors of today's domestic horse. "It looks like, as far as we...

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...

Fossil evidence of a hippopotamus-like creature found on an Arctic island hints at a once-balmy climate – "rather like Florida" – in the polar region, an ecologist says. Fossil footprints of a pantodont, a plant-eating creature weighing about 400 kilograms (880 pounds), add to evidence of sequoia-type trees and crocodile-like beasts in the Arctic millions of years ago, when greenhouse gas concentrations in the air were high. The footprints were discovered at the end of a horizontal coal mine shaft on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The find was 5 kilometres inside a mountain and 300 metres below the surface....

Study: Past global warming altered forests GAINESVILLE, Fla., Nov. 10 (UPI) -- The concept of Pennsylvania palmettos and magnolias in Minnesota may not be too far-fetched in view of research by a University of Florida paleontologist. The research by vertebrate paleontologist Jonathan Bloch and colleagues suggests land plants changed drastically during a period of sudden global warming 55 million years ago. "It indicates that should we have a period of rapid global warming on that scale today, we might expect very dramatic changes to the biota of the planet, not just the mammals and other vertebrates, but forests also completely...

First American primate scurried in through Alaska 22:00 03 March 2008 NewScientist.com news service Andy Coghlan Fossil teeth of the mouse-sized monkey were found in Mississippi and dated to around 55 million years ago (Illustration: Mark A. Klingler/CMNH)The primate's teeth indicate that it lived on a diet of fruit and berries (Image: Joe Suhan/CMU and Mark A Klingler/CMNH)It was only the size of a mouse, but it has the distinction of being the first primate to scurry into the New World. Fossilised teeth of the monkey Teilhardina magnoliana have been found in rocks in Mississippi. They were dated as younger...

The study of the world’s oldest early primate skeleton has brought light to a pivotal event in primate and human evolution: that of the branch split that led to monkeys, apes and humans (anthropoids) on one side, and living tarsiers on the other. The fossil, that was unearthed from an ancient lake bed in central China’s Hubei Province, represents a previously unknown genus and species named Archicebus Achilles. The results of the research were published on 6 June 2013 in Nature. Oldest primate fossil rewrites evolutionary break in human lineage The fossil, which is 55 million years old and dates...

Primitive Mouse-Like Creature May Be Ancestral Mother Of Australia's Unusual Pouched MammalsThe Monito del Monte (Dromiciops gliroides) (Credit: Image courtesy of University of New South Wales) ScienceDaily (Mar. 26, 2008) — They are separated by a vast ocean and by millions of years, but tiny prehistoric bones found on an Australian farm have been directly linked to a strange and secretive little animal that lives today in the southern rainforests of South America. The fossilised ankle and ear bones are those of Australia's earliest known marsupial, Djarthia, a primitive mouse-like creature that lived 55 million years ago. It is a...

Al Gore continues to be the comedic gift that keeps on giving. First, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) revealed on May 24, 2006, that Gore has used enough hydrocarbons to circle the globe to present over 1,000 Power Point presentations on climate change. CEI also revealed that he recently used five large SUVs to haul his movie entourage a mere 500 yards at the Cannes Film Festival in France, all the while admonishing others to curtail their own energy use. Gore's "Saturday Night Live" appearance can't top that kind of comedy. On the heels of these embarrassing revelations, Nature magazine...

Gomphos had long hindlimbs, just like a modern rabbit The fossilised skeleton of a rabbit-like creature that lived 55 million years ago has been found in Mongolia, Science magazine reports. Gomphos elkema, as it is known, is the oldest member of the rabbit family ever to be found. Gomphos was surprisingly similar to modern rabbits - and probably hopped around on its elongated hindlimbs. The fossil adds weight to the idea that rabbit-like creatures first evolved no earlier than 65 million years ago. "This skeleton is very complete," co-author Robert Asher, of Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Germany, told the BBC News...

Human activities are releasing greenhouse gases more than 30 times faster than the rate of emissions that triggered a period of extreme global warming in the Earth's past, according to an expert on ancient climates. "The emissions that caused this past episode of global warming probably lasted 10,000 years. By burning fossil fuels, we are likely to emit the same amount over the next three centuries," said James Zachos, professor of Earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Zachos will present his findings this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...

Evidence Of Global Warming In The Past Supports Greenhouse TheoryScientists have filled in a key piece of the global climate picture for a period 55 million years ago that is considered one of the most abrupt and extreme episodes of global warming in Earth's history. The new results from an analysis of sediment cores from the ocean floor are consistent with theoretical predictions of how Earth's climate would respond to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The new study, led by James Zachos, professor of Earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will be published online...

COAL MINE SEVEN, Svalbard, Norway (Reuters) - Fossils of a hippopotamus-like creature on an Arctic island show the climate was once like that of Florida, giving clues to risks from modern global warming, a scientist said. Fossil footprints of a pantodont, a plant-eating creature weighing about 400 kg (880 lb), add to evidence of sequoia-type trees and crocodile-like beasts in the Arctic millions of years ago when greenhouse gas concentrations in the air were high. "The climate here about 55 million years ago was more like that of Florida," Appy Sluijs, an expert in ancient ecology at Utrecht University in...

Spearheading: scanning electron microscopy reveals a large magnetofossil from an unknown organism surrounded by smaller magnetofossils from bacteria. Scientists have unearthed giant magnetic fossils, the remnants of microbes buried in 55-million-year-old sediment. The growth of these unusual structures during a period of massive global warming provides clues about how climate change might alter the behaviour of organisms. Some bacteria, both living and fossilized, contain magnetite — magnetic iron oxide crystals — that the organisms are thought to use to navigate, orienting themselves along the magnetic field lines of the Earth. But the new fossils are "unlike any magnetite crystal...

PARIS (AFP) – Ancient fossilized teeth of small anthropoid monkeys discovered in Libya suggest our earliest ancestors may have migrated from Asia to Africa, research published Wednesday showed. The origin of anthropoids -- primates including monkeys, apes and humans -- has long been a source of hot debate among palaeontologists. Experts have long argued anthropoids first appeared in Africa -- but recent studies suggest an earlier Asian origin, dating 55 million years ago. Now new fossils, dating 38 to 39 million years ago and discovered in Dur At-Talah in central Libya, further complicate the debate. They reveal the existence of...

Hot blobs of magma - the searing liquid rock beneath the Earth's crust - can spread slow-moving ripples that soar hundreds of meters high across the Earth's surface, a new study suggests. This phenomenon, which works on geologic time scales, may explain relatively rapid pre-historical changes in sea level that occurred without the typical waxing and waning of the polar ice sheets, which hold and release water on scales of thousands and millions of years. This unexplained sea level rise is one of geology's oldest mysteries. During the Paleogene era (65 million to 23 million years ago), the land under...

The continent-hopping habits of early primates have long puzzled scientists, and several scenarios have been proposed to explain how the first true members of the group appeared virtually simultaneously on Asia, Europe and North America some 55 million years ago. But new research using the latest evidence suggests a completely different migration path from those previously proposed and indicates that sudden, rapid global warming drove the dispersal. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences present their findings in the July 25 issue of the Proceedings of the...

Volcanic eruptions caused global temperature spike 55 million years ago By Alan Zarembo, Times Staff Writer 1:03 PM PDT, April 26, 2007 Scientists believe they have solved the mystery of what caused the most rapid global warming in known geologic history, a cataclysmic temperature spike 55 million years ago driven by concentrations of greenhouse gases hundreds of times greater than today. The culprit, the researchers reported Thursday in the journal Science, was a series of volcanic eruptions that set off a chain reaction releasing massive quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. The eruptions occurred on the rift between two continental...

Global warming 55 million years ago suggests a high climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, according to research led by Mark Pagani, associate professor of geology and geophysics at Yale and published in the December 8 issue of Science. For some years, scientists have known that a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere caused the ancient global warming event known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) that began about 55 million years ago. The geologic record shows that the resulting greenhouse effect heated the planet as a whole by about 9 F (5 C), in less than 10,000 years. That...