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Scientists investigating an abandoned quarry in Canada have found what appear to be the oldest known footprints of terrestrial creatures - bug-like creatures 30 centimetres long that crawled from the sea and left tracks in sandy dunes. The sandstone is between 480 and 500 million years old. Scientists believe the discovery region, just north of Lake Ontario outside Kingston, Ontario, was a sandy beach on a primordial sea. Scientists say the find pushes back the colonisation of land by about 40 million years and puts it in or near the late Cambrian period, when the seas were starting to boil...

Our research at the State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, has shown, based on a refined division and correlation of the graptolite-bearing strata in southern Jiangxi, China, that the Kwangsian Orogeny commenced in the early Katian Age of the Late Ordovician. Because of its significant research value, this study is published in Issue 11 of Science China Earth Sciences. An angular unconformity separating the Lower-Middle Devonian and underlying strata is widespread in the Zhujiang region of South China, and occurs across most of Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangxi and Guangdong provinces. This angular unconformity indicates...

New Record-Setting Living Fossil Flabbergasts Scientists   12/05/2003 A remarkably-detailed fossil ostracode, a type of crustacean, has been announced in the Dec. 5 issue of Science1 that is blowing the socks off its discoverers.  Erik Stokstad in a review of the discovery in the same issue2 explains its significance in the evolutionary picture of prehistory: Over the past half-billion years [sic], evolution has dished up [sic] an almost endless variety of novelties: lungs, legs, eyes, wings, scales, feathers, fur.  So when paleontologists find a creature that doesn’t change, they take note.   (Emphasis added in all quotes.) Two things about this...