"After over a hundred years of local palaeontological discovery and excavation, the Frenchman Formation Terrestrial Ecosystem Conference will be held in Eastend, Saskatchewan. Attendees from across North America will present research on the wealth of fossils found in southwest Saskatchewan, including Scotty the T. rex. The organizers of this event (the T. rex Discovery Centre, the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, and the University of Alberta) welcome your participation."
“Flip the right genetic switches in a chicken embryo and you just might hatch a baby dino. Paleontologist Jack Horner intends to do it. He explains his scheme to rewind evolution in a new book, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever. We asked him if there is anything—anything at all—that could possibly go wrong.
Wired: Dinochicken—walk me through the concept.
Jack Horner: Birds are descendants of dinosaurs. They carry their DNA. So in its early stages, a chicken embryo will develop dinosaur traits like a long tail, teeth, and three-fingered hands. If you can find the genes that cancel the tail and fuse the fingers to build a wing—and turn those genes off—you can grow animals with dinosaur characteristics.”
Ancient footprints found at Rutgers' Koobi Fora Field School show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years agoThe footprints were discovered in two 1.5 million-year-old sedimentary layers near Ileret in northern Kenya. These rarest of impressions yielded information about soft tissue form and structure not normally accessible in fossilized bones. The Ileret footprints constitute the oldest evidence of an essentially modern human-like foot anatomy.
A video with some great walking (or at least stomping) in it. It also seems to capture (for me) the essence of the graduate school experience in a ‘Fellini meets Bergman’ sort of way.
A fossil of the fish Incisoscutum ritchiei from the Upper Devonian period (350 Ma) of the Gogo formation of western Australia contains a 5 cm-long embryo. This specimen is one of the earliest examples of a pregnant vertebrate and shows that internal fertilisation, or sex, started far sooner than previously thought.The process of internal fertilisation and giving birth to live young, or viviparity, differentiates some fish and mammals from other animals such as reptiles and amphibians. Johanson and her colleagues believe it was the main reproductive method for early fish groups such as the placoderms and could have evolved in other fish groups.
“Cayetano “Cat” Garza and I just finished up a cover art gig for our good friends at Blackcoat Press. We collaborated on the color cover art for the upcoming translation of the never-before-published-in- English 1910 French science-fiction novel, Panic in Paris.
Dinosaurs erupt from beneath the streets of Paris, two years before Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic The Lost World was published (ending with Professor Challenger and his expedition bringing pterodactyls to London for the final chapter) — meaning this is an essential new discovery and addition to the history of paleontological science fiction, and perhaps even the first full-blown entry in the venerable ‘monsters attack metropolis’ genre of giant monster fantasy.”
mammals and advocated a fully modern approach to taxonomy that emphasized tying scientific names to natural biological populations. His 1930 paper gives a clear statement of this position.
regions revealed a wealth of cultural, archaeological and palaeontological wonders.
Susan Vance, who becomes determined to derail Grant’s next day wedding. Over the course of the next 24 hours Grant gets completely mired in Hepburn’s whirlwind ad hoc plans to catch her new (and completely reluctant) beau that includes hunting for her leopard (the ‘Baby’ of the title), having her steal his clothes, ending up in jail, falling in a stream, and finally losing his “intercostal clavicle” to Hepburn’s dog that was to be the final element needed complete the Brontosaurus skeleton he’s been working on for four years.Note: The Palaeoblogger is sick this week. Things should return to normal in a few days
The 3.2-million-year-old bones of 'Lucy', the skeleton of the Australopithecus afarensis hominin discovered in Ethiopia in 1974, have undergone a complete high-resolution computed tomography scan. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have thereby created a digitized record that will allow the bones' internal structure to be examined (pictured below).
But interest from US museums in hosting an exhibition featuring the 40% complete skeleton is lagging, and officials say it will go into indefinite storage next month at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Texas.
A $2.25-million, five-month Lucy exhibition at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington, which closes on 8 March, is the second leg of what was originally planned to be a ten-city, six-year tour, although concerns were raised over the effects the tour would have on the delicate fossil (see Nature 444, 8; 2006). But total attendance at the Seattle exhibition is likely to be a third of the 250,000 projected, and no other museum has yet signed up for the exhibition.
Keenly observing nature in all its forms—from fossil sloths to mockingbirds, primroses to children—Darwin saw that we all are related. Every living thing shares an ancestry, he concluded, and the vast diversity of life on Earth results from processes at work over millions of years and still at work today. Darwin's explanation for this great unfolding of life through time—the theory of evolution by natural selection—transformed our understanding of the living world, much as the ideas of Galileo, Newton and Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the physical universe.
Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection underlies all modern biology. It enables us to decipher our genes and fight viruses, and to understand Earth's fossil record and rich biodiversity. Simple yet at times controversial, misunderstood and misused for social goals, the theory remains unchallenged as the central concept of biology. Charles Darwin, reluctant revolutionary, profoundly altered our view of the natural world and our place in it.
Schematic drawing (lateral view) of the generalized cichlid cranial skeleton, showing the relative location of the oral jaws (purple) and the pharyngeal jaws of PA7 (blue)"It's likely that every tooth made throughout the evolution of vertebrates has used this core set of genes," said Gareth Fraser.
Scientists report that a common gene regulatory circuit controls the development of all dentitions, from the first teeth in the throats of jawless fishes that lived half a billion years ago, to the incisors and molars of modern vertebrates.
Belated Happy Birthday to this blog that turned 4 years old last Sunday, with more than 1800 postings since we started.
for the study of Natural Sciences in Moravia (published 1866).
A missing link in the evolution of the front claw of living scorpions and horseshoe crabs was identified with the discovery of a 390 million-year-old fossil, Schinderhannes bartelsi.With a head like the giant Cambrian aquatic predator Anomalocaris and a body like a modern arthropod, the specimen (below) is the only known example of this unusual creature. The fossil's head section has large bulbous eyes, a circular mouth opening and a pair of segmented, opposable appendages with spines projecting inward along their length. The trunk section is made up of 12 segments, each with small appendages, and a long tail spine. Between the head and trunk, there is a pair of large triangular wing-like limbs — that likely propelled the creature like a swimming penguin. Unlike its ancestors from the Cambrian period, which reached three feet in length, Schinderhannes is only about 4 inches long.
Scientists quantified the time of origin for 711 lineages of bivalves living in the oceans today, and converted them to evolutionary origination rates. In all but the highest-latitude locations, the team saw the clear signs of a strong increase in origination rates following the end of the Cretaceous.Abstract: The long-term effects of mass extinctions on spatial and evolutionary dynamics have been poorly studied. Here we show that the evolutionary consequences of the end-Cretaceous [Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg)] mass extinction persist in present-day biogeography. The geologic ages of genera of living marine bivalves show a significant break from a smooth exponential distribution, corresponding to the K/Pg boundary. The break reflects a permanent increase in origination rates, intermediate between the Mesozoic rate and the post-extinction recovery pulse. This global rate shift is most clearly seen today in tropical bioprovinces and weakens toward the poles.
where they worked to reconstruct many Stone Age cultures dating as far back as 100,000 to two million years ago. They documented stone tools from primitive stone-chopping instruments to multi-purpose hand axes.
Scientists have found the oldest evidence for animals in the fossil record.The researchers examined sedimentary rocks in south Oman, and found an anomalously high amount of distinctive steroids are produced by sponges that date back to 635 million years ago, to around the end of the last immense ice age.
(from 66.4 to 1.6 million years ago) in chronological order and described them.
Compressive stress in the cranium of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct early human, imposed by biting on the premolar teeth. Bright colors correspond to high stresses, and indicate that a bony pillar running alongside the opening of the nasal cavity acts as a strut that structurally reinforces the face against premolar loads.Using state-of-the-art computer modeling and simulation technology – the same kind engineers use to simulate how a car reacts to forces in a front-end collision – evolutionary scientists built a virtual model of the A. africanus skull and were able to see just how the jaw operated and what forces it could produce.New research reveals nut-cracking abilities in our 2.5-million-year-old relatives that enabled them to alter their diet to adapt to changes in food sources in their environment.
Two newly described fossil whales---a pregnant female and a male of the same species--reveal how primitive whales gave birth and provide new insights into how whales made the transition from land to sea.The 47.5 million-year-old fossils, discovered in Pakistan in 2000 and 2004, are the first discovery of a fetal skeleton of an extinct whale in the group known as Archaeoceti, and the find represents a new species dubbed Maiacetus inuus. (Maiacetus means "mother whale," and Inuus was a Roman fertility god.) The fetus is positioned for head-first delivery, like land mammals but unlike modern whales, indicating that these whales still gave birth on land.
and he had discovered bones belonging to three extinct species: a giant crocodile, a plesiosaur, and Buckland's Megalosaurus. But in 1822 he found several teeth that "possessed characters so remarkable" that they had to have come from a fourth and distinct species of Saurian. After consulting numerous experts, Mantell finally recognized that the teeth bore an uncanny resemblance to the teeth of the living iguana, except that they were twenty times larger. 
