paleontology

 

DNA recovered from fossilised bones of the moa, a giant extinct bird, has revealed a new geological history of New Zealand, reports a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team of scientists led by the University of Adelaide has reconstructed a history of marine barriers, mountain building and glacial cycles in New Zealand over millions of years, using the first complete genetic history of the moa. After almost being totally submerged around 25 million yea

Yet this research is rewriting the geological history of New Zealand and shows how little we really know about it   -Alan Cooper

 

The Flamed Tigersnail, thought to be extinct in Louisiana, are apparently alive and well in Black Bayou. Researchers in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisiana-Monroe found the snails in the Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge north of Monroe. A snail expert had written in 1985 that the gastropod, native to eastern North America and states along the Mississippi River, no longer existed in Louisiana — except in fossil form.  

In a new research, a team of paleontologists has found that extinction rates higher in open-ocean settings during mass extinctions. The research was conducted by Arnie Miller, University of Cincinnati professor of paleontology in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences, and co-author Michael Foote of the University of Chicago. For many years, paleobiological researchers interested in the history of biodiversity have focused on charting the many ups (evolutionary radiations) and downs (mass extinctio  

As a child, we were really into dinosaurs. Jurassic Park was our favorite movie, Dinosaucers was our favorite TV show and Yummy Mummy was our favorite cereal (that's not dinosaur-related, but we didn't want to lie to make the story better). So as we played the new demo for Jurassic: The Hunted, we couldn't help but feel that, with every shot, we were blowing away some small part of our innocence.  

Jurassic: The Hunted is an epic, story-driven first-person shooter set on a dark, mysterious island that connects the modern world with the age of dinosaurs. Players take on the role of Craig Dylan, a weapons and survival expert, hired to protect a research team sent to study the strange temporal energy of the island and recover whatever is left of the expedition lost on the island over twenty years earlier. Every minute is a fight for survival as Dylan must scavenge weapons, defend barricades, and battle  

A restoration of the skull of Sivatherium described by Falconer and Cautley. Sivatherium was first scientifically described in 1836 by the English paleontologists Hugh Falconer and Proby Thomas Cautley . Its bones had come from the Sivalik Hills of India, and it was not quite like anything they had discovered before.  

Researchers in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) have found a 620,000,000-year-old fossil of tubular animal in North Hwanghae province, official media reported Friday. Researchers from the geology faculty of Kim Il Sung University excavated the fossil of the tubular animal in the Proterozoic era of North Hwanghae province, the Korean Central News Agency said in a report. According to the report, the tubular animal was the first organism with skeletal structure on Earth.  

Due to the relative completeness of fossil remains for LB1, the scientists were able to reconstruct a reliable body design that was unlike any modern human. The thigh bone and shin bone of LB1 are much shorter than modern humans including Central African pygmies, South African KhoeSan (formerly known as 'bushmen") and "negrito" pygmies from the Andaman Islands and the Philippines. Some researchers speculate this could represent an evolutionary reversal correlated with "island dwarfing."