Latest Phanerozoic Stories
Data is conclusive, says Keller, who hopes to move on from decades-old controversy A Princeton University geoscientist who has stirred controversy with her studies challenging a popular theory that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs has compiled powerful new evidence asserting her position.Gerta Keller, whose studies of rock formations at many sites in the United States, Mexico and India have led her to conclude that volcanoes, not a vast meteorite, were the more likely culprits in the...
A U.S. scientist says he's found evidence dinosaurs may have survived for 500,000 years in New Mexico and Colorado after the Cretaceous extinctions. Jim Fassett, an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Fe, N.M., said he based his conclusions on detailed chemical investigations of the dinosaur bones, and evidence for the age of the rocks in which they were found in the Ojo Alamo Sandstone in the San Juan Basin. The great difficulty with this hypothesis -- that these are...
According to researchers, a wide-hipped Homo erectus fossil found in Ethiopia suggests that females of the pre-human species gave birth to developed babies with large heads.The finding leads some researchers to believe that helpless babies came along late in human evolution."We could look at this pelvis and then, using a series of measurements, we can calculate ... how big the baby's head could be at birth," said Scott Simpson, a paleontologist at Case Western Reserve...
U.S. scientists say the Earth is in the midst of its sixth mass extinction of plants and animals, with nearly 50 percent of all species disappearing. Biologists at the University of California-Santa Barbara say they are working to determine which species must be saved. "The current extinction event is due to human activity, paving the planet, creating pollution, many of the things that we are doing today," said study co-author Assistant Professor Bradley Cardinale. "The Earth might well lose...
By Rick Steelhammer What's 12 feet long, has 6-inch claws and weighs a ton or more? It's Megalonyx jeffersonii, and starting Saturday, a precise scientific replica of its skeletal remains will be on display at the West Virginia Geological Survey Museum near Morgantown. In March, the Legislature designated the Megalonyx jeffersonii the official state fossil, since the first known specimen of the prehistoric species was found in a West Virginia cave more than 200 years ago. Megalonyx...
By Robert S. Boyd / McClatchy Newspapers It was the greatest mass murder of all time - poison everywhere, billions slain - but the killers have never been positively identified. An estimated 95 percent of marine species and 85 percent of land creatures died, said Peter Ward, a paleobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. Scientists call it "The Great Dying." Life took millions of years to recover. Scientific sleuths now think they're making progress toward learning...
GigOptix, the leading provider of electronic engines for the optically connected digital world announces today the successful fruits of its partnership with Pangaea (HK) Ltd. Pangaea successfully penetrated a leading global provider of telecommunications equipment and network solutions in China with the iT6134. The GigOptix modulator driver has been adopted into mass production in one of the fastest growing markets in the world, and will lead to expanded part implementations ranging from...
A study published in the current issue of Science challenges the long-held belief that diversity of marine species has been increasing continuously since the origin of animals. Dr. Thomas D. Olszewski, a geology and geophysics professor at Texas A&M University, has been a part of the international team that carried out this decade-long study, which concludes that most of the diversification occurred early on "“ relatively speaking."The general understanding for many decades has been...
Human ancestor's teeth yields new cluesTiny marks on the teeth of an ancient human ancestor known as the "Nutcracker Man" may upset current evolutionary understanding of early hominid diet.Using high-powered microscopes, researchers looked at rough geometric shapes on the teeth of several Nutcracker Man specimens and determined that their structure alone was not enough to predict diet.Peter Ungar, professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, contends the...
In a paper published in this month's "˜Geophysical Journal International', Dr Graeme Eagles from the Earth Sciences Department at Royal Holloway, University of London, reveals how one of the largest continents ever to exist met its demise.Gondwana was a "˜supercontinent' that existed between 500 and 180 million years ago. For the past four decades, geologists have debated how Gondwana eventually broke up, developing a multitude of scenarios which can be loosely grouped into two schools of...
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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