Paleontology
Category archives for Paleontology
The Fantastic Mystery of the Younger Dryas
Posted by Greg Laden on January 11, 2009 One of the most interesting and exciting stories in science is that of the Younger Dryas. The Younger Dryas was a climate event that had important effects on human history, and that has been reasonably linked to some of our most important cultural changes, and ultimately some evolutionary changes as well. That is one reason…
How fast does evolution happen?
Posted by Greg Laden on December 30, 2008 … and other matters. The following list represents widely held beliefs, either first order beliefs (things you hear people say) or second order beliefs (things implied directly by what people say):
Should we clone a Neanderthal. Or maybe two?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 26, 2008 Personally, I think we should start with a dodo, and then work our way up the ethical ladder from there. … We know roughly how the sequence of life ran forward in time. What about running it backward? … Last week in Nature, scientists reported major progress in sequencing the genome of woolly mammoths. [see…
Mammoth DNA Sequence
Posted by Greg Laden on November 23, 2008 The genome of the extinct woolley mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius) has been sequenced, and reported in Nature. This confirms that elephant genomes are large, like the elephants themselves. It confirms previously proposed relationships amongst the elephants (see phylogeny below) and refines the known phylogeny. Interpopulation differences among mammoths were also demonstrated. Here’s the phylogeny: Comparison of…
A Whale of a Missing Link : Indohyus
Posted by Greg Laden on October 19, 2008 Yet another missing link has been found! This new find links whales to quadrupedal land mammals. Thewissen et al. report in Nature new fossil material from the Middle Eocene of Kashmir, India. This species (in the genus Indohyus is represented by a remarkable set of remains, including cranial and post cranial material. Previous studies using…
Remarkable Fossil Findings
Posted by Greg Laden on October 17, 2008 I have three neat news stories to report, including the oldest insect ever, all cool fossil finds being reported just now. Walking Fish Helps Fill Evolutionary Gap Some 375 million years ago, a unique fish existed with features in its head that helped pave the way for vertebrate animals to live on land, scientists said…
The Carnival of Evolution #3
Posted by Greg Laden on October 1, 2008 Welcome to the Third Edition of the Carnival of Evolution. The previous edition of this web log ‘carnival of the vanities’ was at Jason Rosenhouse’s Evolution Blog. The next edition will be written by Mike (TUIBG) and hosted here, at Clashing Cultures. Please submit your web posts on Evolution for the next carnival, which is…
Aerosteon riocoloradensis: A Very Cool Dinosaur from Argentina
Posted by Greg Laden on September 29, 2008 Fossils of a newly discovered species of dinosaur — a 10-meter-long, elephant-weight predator — were discovered in 1996 along the banks of Argentina’s Rio Colorado, and are now being reported after a long period of careful study. This dinosaur dates to about 85 million years (which falls within the Cretaceous period). Perhaps the most interesting…
Extinct Lemur Brought Back to Life. Virtually.
Posted by Greg Laden on July 30, 2008 Austrian Franz Sikora was a fossil hunter and merchant of ancient bones working in the 19th centuyr. In 1899 he found the first known specimen, which was to become the type fossil, of Hadropithecus stenognathus in Madagascar. This is an extinct lemur. To be honest, I’m not sure when this lemur went extinct, but I…
The Evolution of Cats: Sabertooth vs. Regular
Posted by Greg Laden on July 30, 2008 Sabertooth Cat, Megantereon nihowanensisl There are two kinds of “true cats.” Cat experts call one type feline or “modern” partly because they are the ones that did not go extinct. If you have a pet cat, it’s a modern/feine cat. This also includes the lions, tigers, leopards, etc. The other kind are called “sabercats”…
The seductive siren of soft tissue preservation: Ancient dinosaur flesh wasn’t ancient. Or dinosaur flesh.
Posted by Greg Laden on July 29, 2008 An ugly fact killing a beautiful hypothesis I’m not mentioning any names, and don’t ask me any details. In fact, don’t repeat this story. Some years ago, when I was a mere graduate student, a fellow student working in an unnamed country in Africa discovered a very very old stone artifact. To this day, this…
Gobi Dinosaur is “complete skeleton”
Posted by Greg Laden on July 24, 2008 Notice how I put “complete skeleton” in quotes. A paleontologist’s idea of complete is not exactly the same as everyone else’s.. But this Gobi Desert Tyrannosauris-like Tarbosaurus has a lot of its bone. It was recently extracted from sandstone blocks dug up a couple of years ago. Another nice thing about this fossil is that…
Canadian Dinosaur Find: New Species?
Posted by Greg Laden on June 16, 2008 The first dinosaur bones (that we know of) to have been discovered in British Columbia, Canada, are now being reported. These are bones found in 1971, eventually making their way to the Royal British Columbia Museum, and now being reported by V.M. Arbour and M.C. Graves. The bones were initially found by Kenny Flyborg Larsen,…
New Species of Dinosaur?
Posted by Greg Laden on June 16, 2008 All I have is a lousy press release, since my University does not subscribe to this journal. (Well,we get it but I am not allowed to see the most recent six months!). So here it is:
Two Dinosaur Books for the Kiddies
Posted by Greg Laden on June 12, 2008 Giant Dinosaurs of the Jurassic is a children’s book for kids in third to fifth grade or, in my opinion, a little younger. Certainly this is an excellent choice, because of the cool illustrations, of a book to read aloud to the pre-literate little ones.
Arabian Dinosaur Trackway Discovered
Posted by Greg Laden on June 1, 2008 Dinosaur tracks are reported for the first time on the Arabian Peninsula. These new tracks are located in Yemen. This find is interesting and important for several reasons.
Reconsidering the Reconstruction of the Pterosaur
Posted by Greg Laden on May 27, 2008 A very large Azhdarchid shown with a human for scale. Azhdarchids were pterosaurs (flying reptile-like creatures) of the Cretaceous. These included some gigantic critters with up to a 10 meter wing span, but also some little ones (2.5 meters or so). Most reconstructions of these flying animals have them skim-feeding across the surface of bodies…
Earliest Known Abalone Discovered
Posted by Greg Laden on May 16, 2008 May 18, 2008 — A tiny abalone specimen 5.9 mm in length and approximately 78 million years old (putting it in the middle Campanian Stage of the Late Cretaceous) has been documented from rocks in the Garapito Creek area of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles County by Lindsey T. Groves and John M. Alderson of the…
Cambrian Food Webs
Posted by Greg Laden on April 28, 2008 Food webs — the network of trophic (eating) interaction among the many species sharing a habitat or biome — is a much studied aspect of ecology. Food web and other similar phenomena such as dispersal syndromes are epiphenomena of evolution, resulting from the negotiation of competitive and cooperative interactions among many individuals. Indeed, the food…
Ancient Soft Parts: Dinosaur and Elephant Tales
Posted by Greg Laden on April 27, 2008 Some of my colleagues are downplaying the recent paper in science showing a: that mastodons are elephants and b: that birds and dinosaurs … in particular Tyrannosaurus rex and turkeys … are related. (See here and here, for instance) Yes, it is true that these phylogenetic findings are wholly uninteresting, being exactly what we expected.…
Elephants Were Aquatic
Posted by Greg Laden on April 15, 2008 That elephants have an aquatic ancestry has been suspected for some time now. Moreover, the idea of elephant aquatic origins and elephant origins in general is part of a growing realization that many of the world’s aquatic mammals originated in a couple of regions of Africa that were for a very long time enormous inland…
New in Paperback Book on Permian Mass Extinction
Posted by Greg Laden on April 14, 2008 When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time is a book by Michael Benton on the Permian Extinction now out in paperback. From the press release: Today it is common knowledge that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteorite impact sixty-five million years ago, which killed half of all species then…
Did sexist white males cause the extinction of the woolly mammoth, or was it climate change?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 7, 2008 Ever since 3,599 years ago humans have been asking the question “Why did our furry elephant go extinct?” What caused the woolly mammoth’s (not to be confused with the also-woolly mastodon) extinction? Climate warming in the Holocene might have driven the extinction of this cold-adapted species, yet the species had survived previous warming periods, suggesting…
The Smithsonian Institution Is Not Smarter Than a Fifth Grader
Posted by Greg Laden on April 7, 2008 Fifth grader Kenton Stufflebeam is smarter than the Smithsonian Institution. Since 1981, the Tower of Time exhibit has indicated that the Precambrian is an “era” … when in fact it is not an actual era. The student informed the museum, and now the Smithsonian is working on plans to paint over the word “era.” [source]
The Boneyard XIII
Posted by Greg Laden on April 6, 2008 Grrrrrrrrrrrrr…. Welcome to the Lucky 13th Edition of The Boneyard … the Web Carnival about Bones and Stuff. “The Boneyard is a blog carnival covering all things paleo, from dinosaurs to pollen to hominids and everywhere in between. It’s held every two weeks (the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month), traveling around to a…
Mammals and the KT Event
Posted by Greg Laden on April 4, 2008 A very important and truly wonderful paper in Nature described a tour-de-force analysis of the Mammalian Evolutionary Record, and draws the following two important conclusions: The diversification of the major groups of mammals occurred millions of years prior to the KT boundary event; and The further diversification of these groups into the modern pattern of…
Saving Science from Creationists and Framers: In support of a diligent, relentless critique
Posted by Greg Laden on March 26, 2008 When you get a chance (not right now) have a look at this video. This is a piece done by Brian Rooney, a professional TV journalist with ABC News Nightline. He follows around Billy Jack and Rusty Carter, two young earth creationists who are leading a school group through the Denver Museum of Nature and…
Darwin and the Voyage: 11 ~ Elephants and Horses
Posted by Greg Laden on February 22, 2008 In 1833, Darwin spent a fair amount of time on the East Coast of South America, including in the Pampas, where he had access to abundant fossil material. Here I’d like to examine his writings about some of the megafauna, including Toxodon, Mastodon, and horses, and his further considerations of biogeography and evolution.
Darwin and the Voyage: 09 ~ Fossil Quadrupeds
Posted by Greg Laden on February 18, 2008 Charles Darwin wrote a book called Geological Observations on South America. Since Fitzroy needed to carry out intensive and extensive coastal mapping in South America, and Darwin was, at heart, a geologist more than anything else (at least during the Beagle’s voyage), this meant that Darwin would become the world’s expert on South American geology.…
The Boneyard Lucky 13
Posted by Greg Laden on February 16, 2008 < — If you can tell me what this thing is, I’d be much obliged. The Boneyard. This is approximately the 13th installment of The Boneyard Web Carnival, dated February 9th, plus or minus a week or so. In paleontology, we do not concern ourselves with trifles such as exact dates. The Boneyard web carnival…
, which is now available for the 
