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 •
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...
Posted on April 14, 2008 1:16 PM • 3 Comments •
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...
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Posted on April 7, 2008 7:58 PM • 14 Comments •
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...
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Posted on April 4, 2008 5:00 PM • 2 Comments •
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,...
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Posted on February 22, 2008 1:06 PM • 0 Comments •
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name ... the Anthropocene ... are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to "Anthropocene" and I propose that...
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Posted on January 31, 2008 7:07 AM • 12 Comments •
Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal...
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Posted on January 25, 2008 7:57 PM • 2 Comments •
The end-Permian mass extinction event was the big daddy of all the known mass extinction events. Life on the planet Earth was almost entirely wiped out. A new paper explores the post-extinction recovery of ecological systems....
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Posted on January 23, 2008 1:00 PM • 4 Comments •
