Latest Phanerozoic Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Many researchers believe that one of the pivotal events in becoming human was the development of terrestrial bipedalism, or the ability to walk on two legs. Much has been made of our ancestors "coming down out of the trees." After all, the majority of our living primate relatives – for example, the great apes – still spend a great deal of their time in trees. In the primate family, humans are the only branch devoted to the ground,...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One of the major features of the Australian Archaeological Association's (AAA) Conference at the University of Wollongong this week was the unveiling of the face of Homo floresiensis – popularly known as the "Hobbit." Hosted by UOW’s Centre for Archaeological Science, which was created in 2010 to develop, integrate and apply modern scientific methods to the questions of human evolution, the conference consists of over 400...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online There’s a popular cartoon geared towards adults which tells the story of a hapless young man who accidentally stumbles into a cryogenic capsule just moments before the turn of the century. The capsule just so happens to be set for 1,000 years, long enough for a couple of alien and robot uprisings and for the entire world our character knew to be virtually wiped away. The rest of the show is centered on how this 20th century guy...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of anthropologists, led by the University of Toronto, has found evidence that human ancestors used stone tipped weapons for hunting 500,000 years ago. This is 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to the new study published in Science. "This changes the way we think about early human adaptations and capacities before the origin of our own species," says Jayne Wilkins, a PhD candidate in the Department of...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Our ancestors about 3.5 million years ago had a diet that mainly consisted of tropical grasses and sedges, according to a new study. Scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that they extracted information from the fossilized teeth of three Australopithecus bahrelghazali individuals, which were the first early hominins excavated at two sites in Africa. "We found evidence suggesting that early...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A mass extinction, wiping out numerous species including the dinosaurs, marked the end of the Cretaceous Period. A new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula is home to the now-buried Chicxulub impact crater, caused by a mountain-sized asteroid. This impact is...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Have you heard of giant hippopotamuses wandering along the banks of the Elbe in Germany lately? They are not a common sight today, that is for sure, but 1.8 million years ago, hippos were a prominent part of European wildlife along with other megafauna such as woolly mammoths and giant cave bears. A new study by paleontologists, published in the journal Boreas, claims that the changing climate during the Pleistocene may have forced...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists have known that Australopithecus afarensis – the species of the well-known Lucy specimen – was an upright walking species, but they debate whether or not A. afarensis spent much of its time in trees. A comprehensive answer to this question has been unavailable because a complete set of A. afarensis shoulder blades has never been available for study. Professor David Green of Midwestern University and Zeresenay...
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online An international team of scientists has reconstructed the dietary preferences of 3 groups of hominins found in South Africa. The paper, “Evidence for diet but not landscape use in South African early hominins," is a joint effort between the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Université de Toulouse Paul Sabatier, and the University of the Witwatersrand and has been selected for Advanced Online Publication in the journal Nature. The...
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online As the human and primate fossil records become more complete, researchers are beginning to see the amount of complexity involved in man’s evolution. That evolutionary tree became even more complex with the discovery of new fossils that suggest there were two additional Homo species living alongside our direct ancestors, Homo erectus, around two million years ago. According to a report published in the journal Nature this week,...
Latest Phanerozoic Reference Libraries
Thescelosaurus, meaning “godlike”, “wondrous”, or “marvelous” and “lizard” was a genus of small ornithopod dinosaur that appeared at the very end of the Late Cretaceous period in North America. It was a member of the last dinosaurian fauna before the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event around 65.5 million years ago. The completeness and preservation of many of its specimens illustrate that it might have preferred to live near streams. This bipedal ornithopod is known from...
Daspletosaurus, meaning “frightful lizard” is a genus of tyrannosaurid theropod dinosaur that resided in western North America between 77 and 74 million years ago, during the Late Cretaceous Period. Fossils of the only named species were found in Alberta, although other possible species from Alberta and Montana wait for description. Daspletosaurus is closely related to the much larger and more current Tyrannosaurus. Like most of the known tyrannosaurids, it was a multi-ton bipedal...
Deinonychus is a genus of carnivorous dromaeosaurid dinosaurs. There’s one described species, Deinonychus antirrhopus. These dinosaurs, which were capable of growing to be 11 ft long, lived during the early Cretaceous Period, around 115 to 108 million years ago. Fossils have been uncovered from the U.S states of Wyoming, Montana, and Oklahoma, in rocks of the Cloverly Formation and Antlers Formation, though teeth that might belong to Deinonychus have been found much farther east in...
Image Caption: Head of Tenontosaurus, Institut de paléontologie humaine, Paris, France. Credit: Rémih/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) Tenontosaurus, meaning “sinew lizard”, is a genus of medium to large sized ornithopod dinosaur. The genus is known from the late Aptian to Albian ages of the middle Cretaceious period sediments of western North America, dating roughly between 115 to 108 million years ago. It was formerly thought to be a ‘hypsilophodont’, but since Hypsilophodontia is no...
The Paramyladon, an extinct genus of ground sloth, was native to North America. It lived from the Pliocene era to the Pleistocene era, a period of about 4.889 years. Remains of this creature have been found as far south as Guatemala, throughout North America, and even as far north as Alberta, Canada. Paramyladon has been easily mistaken with another ground sloth called Glossotherium, due to major similarities. Barnum Brown created the Paramyladon genus in 1903 with a species of P....
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