Paleontology:
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,...
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Posted on July 30, 2008 11:49 PM • 1 Comments •
 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...
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Posted on July 30, 2008 9:49 AM • 18 Comments •
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...
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Posted on July 29, 2008 8:00 PM • 21 Comments •
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...
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Posted on July 24, 2008 9:17 AM • 4 Comments •
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....
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Posted on June 16, 2008 4:54 PM • 4 Comments •
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....
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Posted on June 12, 2008 8:00 PM • 2 Comments •
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....
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Posted on June 1, 2008 11:35 AM • 2 Comments •
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...
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Posted on May 27, 2008 8:34 PM • 9 Comments •
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...
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Posted on May 16, 2008 7:59 PM • 1 Comments •
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...
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Posted on April 28, 2008 8:08 PM • 0 Comments •
