Latest Fossils Stories
University of Oregon scientist finds evidence that the transition occurred in humid, wooded floodplains A small fish crawling on stumpy limbs from a shrinking desert pond is an icon of can-do spirit, emblematic of a leading theory for the evolutionary transition between fish and amphibians. This theorized image of such a drastic adaptation to changing environmental conditions, however, may, itself, be evolving into a new picture. University of Oregon scientist Gregory J. Retallack,...
Researchers have revealed that the African lungfish can use its thin pelvic limbs to propel itself forward. The team's discovery reshuffles the order of evolutionary events leading up to creatures being able to walk, and also suggests that fossil tracks long thought to be the work of early tetrapods could have been produced instead by lobe-finned ancestors of the lungfish. "In a number of these trackways, the animals alternate their limbs, which suggested that they must have been made...
Paleontologists working on fossils from Kangaroo Island in South Australia have discovered that the Earth's first apex predator had highly acute vision that rivaled or exceeded that of most living insects and crustaceans. The researchers from South Australian Museum and University of Adelaide discovered exceptionally preserved fossil eyes of the top predator in the Cambrian ocean from over 500 million years ago: the fearsome Anomalocaris. The species is considered to be at the top of...
Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan and Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have followed fossilized footprints to a multi-legged predator that ruled the seas of the Cambrian period about half a billion years ago. "Short of finding an animal at the end of its trackway, it's really very rare to be able to identify the producer so confidently," said Nicholas Minter, lead author of the article on the study, which appears in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Minter...
Researchers from the University of Western Australia and the University of Oxford have unearthed what they believe are the oldest fossils ever discovered-single-celled organisms that are thought to be 3.4 billion years old, according to a Sunday article by Nicholas Wade of the New York Times. The discovery, which is detailed in the latest edition of the journal Nature Geoscience, took place in a remote location known as Strelley Pool, which is located in Western Australia. The team that...
Paleontologists have discovered 515-million-year-old fossils which show that ancient animals had excellent vision and could even see in the dark, reports the Telegraph. An international team of scientists led by the South Australian Museum and the University of Adelaide found the fossils, which look like "squashed eyes from a recently swatted fly," on Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Researchers said the eyes have more than 3,000 lenses, making them more powerful than any known eye fossil...
Geologists at MIT and Harvard have discovered fossils along the Alaska-Canada border that reveal protective plates for microscopic organisms. Phoebe Cohen, a postdoc in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and Francis Macdonald, an assistant professor of geology at Harvard University, spent two weeks chiseling out rock samples during the summer of 2007 in a remote mountain range in the Yukon.They brought the rocks back to Cambridge and made a surprising...
Ancient sea creatures, that were the largest predators for millions of years, grew even larger and survived much longer than previously thought, according to paleontologists who discovered well-preserved fossils in Morocco. The creatures, known as anomalocaridids, ranged in size from 2 to as much as 6 feet long. They had soft-jointed bodies and toothy maws with spiny limbs in front to catch their prey, scientists described in a paper published by the journal Nature. "They were really at the...
Extinction of fishes 360 million years ago created natural ecology experiment In modern ecology, the removal or addition of a predator to an ecosystem can produce dramatic changes in the population of prey species. For the first time, scientists have observed the same dynamics in the fossil record, thanks to a mass extinction that decimated ocean life 360 million years ago.What was bad for fish was good for the fish's food, according to a paper published May 2 in Proceedings of the National...
Geologists at Brown University and the University of Washington have a cautionary tale: Lose enough species in the oceans, and the entire ecosystem could collapse. Looking at two of the greatest mass extinctions in Earth's history, the scientists attribute the ecosystems' collapse to a loss in the variety of species sharing the same space. It took up to 10 million years after the mass extinctions for the ecosystem to stabilize. The findings appear in Geology.The world's oceans are under...
Latest Fossils Reference Libraries
The Variable bushy feather star is commonly found concealed on shallow water reefs in the western Pacific Ocean. The parts that will be most often seen are the fern-like arms. The arms start at the base with five rays then begin to divide from there. The arms are flexible due to the multiple calcium filled joints, also called ossicle; therefore if needed these arms could coil up and provide protection to the main body. Interestingly, if one arm should fall off, or perhaps pulled off, then two...
The noble feather star (also known as the yellow feather star) reaches up to 15.75 inches in diameter with a cup-shaped body. There can be 35-40 arms extending out of the central part of the body. The arms are primarily yellow with the underside having a variation to include black, green, or white. The noble feather star feeds on food debris, phytoplankton and zooplankton. Phytoplankton and zooplankton are microscopic organisms that are present mainly in the layer of the oceans that is...
Petrified Forest National Park is located in the state of Arizona in the United States. The park holds 221,552 acres of land, of which 50,260 acres are comprised of a designated wilderness. The area was once inhabited by Native American tribes including the basket maker and pueblo peoples. The first American explorers to enter the area arrived while searching for good routes leading from east to west. This group, led by Army Lieutenant Amiel Whipple, surveyed the northern area of the...
Aragonite is a polymorph of the mineral calcite, both having the chemical composition CaCO3. Its structure differs from calcite and leads to a different crystal shape, an orthorhombic system with acicular crystals. By repeated twinning pseudo-hexagonal forms result. It may be columnar or fibrous, occasionally in branching stalactitic forms called flos-ferri (flowers of iron) from their association with the ores at the Carthinian iron mines. The type location for aragonite is Molina de...
