Paleontology

Did A Cosmic Event Cause Global Cooling And Doom Clovis Culture?

New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mamma ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 15 2007 - 3:56pm

Arrogant Scientists Battle To Represent All Of Humanity

American paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, died on 12 Apr 1897. Cope is best remembered for his rivalry with O.C. Marsh, often referred to as the Great Bone Wars. These two antagonists shared a lot in common: a fierce sense of competition, unbounded arr ...

Article - Sarda Sahney - Sep 5 2007 - 2:51pm

80 Million Year Old Fossils Show Some Dinosaurs Got Smaller Over Time So They Could Fly

An 80-million-year-old dinosaur fossil unearthed in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia demonstrates that miniaturization, long thought to be a hallmark of bird origins and a necessary precursor of flight, occurred progressively in primitive dinosaurs. The find, d ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 6 2007 - 5:08pm

First Modern Ears Go Back 260 Million Years- And To Russia

Why would prehistoric reptiles have needed to develop modern ears? No one can say for sure but it is certain that a new study by Johannes Müller and Linda Tsuji, paleobiologists at the Natural History Museum of the Humboldt University in Berlin, has pushed ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 11 2007 - 9:26pm

How Paleontologists Match Fossil Tracks With Their Makers

Fossilized footprints are relatively common, but figuring out exactly which ancient creature made particular tracks has been a mystery that has long stumped paleontologists. In the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, a team of researche ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 13 2007 - 12:45am

15 Million Year-Old California Whale Fossil Among Most Complete Ever

A fossilized whale skeleton excavated 20 years ago amid the stench and noise of a seabird and elephant seal rookery on California's Año Nuevo Island turns out to be the youngest example on the Pacific coast of a fossil whale fall and the first in Cali ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 13 2007 - 5:38pm

New Cerasinops Hodgskissi Species Of Dinosaur Is Link Between American And Asian Dinosaurs

Sometimes it takes two decades to identify something but the wait is worth it. A dinosaur skeleton found 24 years ago in Montana has finally been identified as a new species that links North American dinosaurs with Asian dinosaurs. The dinosaur would have ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 24 2007 - 12:31pm

New Dinosaur Species, Gryposaurus Monumentensis, Unearthed In Utah

The newest dinosaur species to emerge from Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument had some serious bite, according to researchers from the Utah Museum of Natural History (UNMH) at the University of Utah. “It was one of the most robust duck-billed dino ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 3 2007 - 6:36pm

Large Dinosaur Tracks Found In Cretaceous Period Polar Region

The first fossil tracks belonging to large, carnivorous dinosaurs discovered in Victoria, Australia show that large dinosaurs were living in a polar environment during the Cretaceous Period, when Australia was still joined to Antarctica and close to the So ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2007 - 4:15pm

330 Million Year Old Full Body Amphibian Imprints Found In Pennsylvania

Unprecedented fossilized body imprints of amphibians have been discovered in 330 million-year-old rocks from Pennsylvania. The imprints show the unmistakably webbed feet and bodies of three previously unknown, foot-long salamander-like critters that lived ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 30 2007 - 3:10pm