July 9, 2010, 6:53 AM CT

Mojoceratops: New Dinosaur Species Named

When Nicholas Longrich discovered a new dinosaur species with a heart-shaped frill on its head, he wanted to come up with a name just as flamboyant as the dinosaur's appearance. Over a few beers with fellow paleontologists one night, he blurted out the first thing that came to mind: Mojoceratops.

"It was just a joke, but then everyone stopped and looked at each other and said, 'Wait - that actually sounds cool,' " said Longrich, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University. "I tried to come up with serious names after that, but Mojoceratops just sort of stuck".

With the publication of Longrich's paper describing his find in the Journal of Paleontology, online today, the name is now official.

The dinosaur is one of more than a dozen species belonging to the chasmosaurine ceratopsid family, which are defined by elaborate frills on their skulls. A plant eater about the size of a hippopotamus, Mojoceratops appeared about 75 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous - 10 million years earlier than its well-known cousin, the Triceratops. The species, which is correlation to another dinosaur in Texas, is found only in Canada's Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces and was short-lived, having survived for only about one million years.

It was only after coming up with the unusual name that Longrich looked into its etymology. Surprisingly, he observed that it was a perfect fit for the species, which sported a flamboyant, heart-shaped frill on its head......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

July 1, 2010, 6:52 AM CT

Extinction of woolly mammoth and saber-toothed cat

A new analysis of the extinction of woolly mammoths and other large mammals more than 10,000 years ago suggests that they may have fallen victim to the same type of "trophic cascade" of ecosystem disruption that researchers say is being caused today by the global decline of predators such as wolves, cougars, and sharks.

In each case the cascading events were originally begun by human disruption of ecosystems, a newly released study concludes, but around 15,000 years ago the problem was not the loss of a key predator, but the addition of one human hunters with spears.

In a study published recently in the journal BioScience, scientists propose that this mass extinction was caused by newly-arrived humans tipping the balance of power and competing with major predators such as saber-toothed cats. An equilibrium that had survived for thousands of years was disrupted, possibly explaining the loss of two-thirds of North America's large mammals during this period.

"For decades, researchers have been debating the causes of this mass extinction, and the two theories with the most support are hunting pressures from the arrival of humans, and climate change," said William Ripple, a professor of forest ecosystems and society at Oregon State University, and an expert on the ecosystem alterations that researchers are increasingly finding when predators are added or removed......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

June 17, 2010, 7:17 AM CT

Dinosaur-Chewing Mammals

Paleontologists have discovered the oldest mammalian tooth marks yet on the bones of ancient animals, including several large dinosaurs. They report their findings in a paper published online June 16 in the journal Paleontology.

Nicholas Longrich of Yale University and Michael J. Ryan of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History came across several of the bones while studying the collections of the University of Alberta Laboratory for Vertebrate Palaeontology and the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology. They also found additional bones displaying tooth marks during fieldwork in Alberta, Canada. The bones are all from the Late Cretaceous epoch and date back about 75 million years.

The pair discovered tooth marks on a femur bone from a Champsosaurus, an aquatic reptile that grew up to five feet long; the rib of a dinosaur, most likely a hadrosaurid or ceratopsid; the femur of another large dinosaur that was likely an ornithischian; and a lower jaw bone from a small marsupial.

The scientists believe the marks were made by mammals because they were created by opposing pairs of teeth-a trait seen only in mammals from that time. They think they were most likely made by multituberculates, an extinct order of archaic mammals that resemble rodents and had paired upper and lower incisors. Several of the bones display multiple, overlapping bites made along the curve of the bone, revealing a pattern similar to the way people eat corn on the cob......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

May 25, 2010, 7:12 AM CT

Revealing China's ancient past

An archeologist at Washington University in St. Louis is helping to reveal for the first time a snapshot of rural life in China during the Han Dynasty.

The rural farming village of Sanyangzhuang was flooded by silt-heavy water from the Yellow River around 2,000 year ago.

Working with Chinese colleagues, T.R. Kidder, PhD, professor and chair of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, is working to excavate the site, which offers a exceptionally well-preserved view of daily life in Western China more than 2,000 years ago.

The research was presented at the Society for American Archeology meeting in St. Louis is April and highlighted last month in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"It's an amazing find," says Kidder of the site, which was discovered in 2003. "We are literally sitting on a gold mine of archeology that is untapped".

What scientists find fascinating and surprising, says Kidder, is that the town, though located in a remote section of the Han Dynasty kingdom, appears quite well off.

Exploration has revealed tiled roofs, compounds with brick foundations, eight-meter deep wells lined with bricks, toilets, cart and human foot tracks, roads and trees.

There is an abundance of metal tools, including plow shares, as well as grinding stones and coins. Also found have been fossilized impressions of mulberry leaves, which scientists see as a sign of silk cultivation......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

May 25, 2010, 6:57 AM CT

Measuring body temperatures of extinct species

A newly released study by scientists from five institutions including the University of Florida introduces the first method to directly measure body temperatures of extinct vertebrates and help reconstruct temperatures of ancient environments.

The study, appearing in this week's online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how researchers could use carbon and oxygen isotopes from fossils to more accurately determine whether extinct animals were warm-blooded or cold-blooded and better estimate temperature ranges during the times these animals lived.

"Without a time machine, it has previously been impossible to directly take the temperature of extinct animals such as dinosaurs or megalodon sharks," said co-author of study Richard Hulbert, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. "The method described in the study has been shown to work with 12-million-year-old fossils from Florida and the next step is to look at even older fossils. For example, we have no teeth of Titanoboa, the largest snake ever discovered, but we could use 60-million-year-old crocodylian teeth from the same deposit to find out more about the snake's environment".

Funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the new "clumped-isotope" paleothermometer method used in the study analyzes two rare heavy isotopes, carbon-13 and oxygen-18, found in tooth enamel, bones and eggshells......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

March 19, 2010, 10:54 AM CT

Revisiting Chicxulub

For decades, researchers have accumulated ever-larger datasets that suggest an enormous space rock crashed into the ocean off the Yucatan Peninsula more than 65 million years ago, resulting in the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction.

Recent research, supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF), suggested that the impact could have occurred 300,000 years previous to the K-Pg extinction, and that another cause--perhaps a second impact, or the long-lasting volcanic activity at the Deccan Traps in what is now India--drove numerous plant and animal species to their end.

Now, an interdisciplinary team of 41 researchers from 12 nations, also supported in part by NSF, has prepared a paper to specifically counter the volcanic and dual-impact alternatives, a comprehensive review of the multiple, global lines of evidence linking a single impact near what is now Chicxulub, Mexico, to the timing and breadth of the K-Pg extinction.

The researchers, led by Peter Schulte of the University of Erlangen-Nuremburg, present their findings in the March 5, 2010, issue of Science.

"We felt it important to present the wealth of data now available about the remarkable and exact connection between the impact in the Yucatan and the extinction event at the K-Pg boundary," said University of Texas geophysicist Sean Gulick, one of the authors on the paper......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

February 1, 2010, 7:56 AM CT

New light on our earliest fossil ancestry

Decaying corpses are usually the domain of forensic scientists, but palaeontologists have discovered that studying rotting fish sheds new light on our earliest ancestry.

The researchers, from the Department of Geology at the University of Leicester, devised a new method for extracting information from 500 million year old fossils -they studied the way fish decompose to gain a clearer picture of how our ancient fish-like ancestors would have looked. Their results indicate that some of the earliest fossils from our part of the tree of life may have been more complex than has previously been thought.

Their findings have been published recently, Sunday Jan 31, ahead of print in Advance Online Publication (AOP) of the science journal Nature on www.nature.com The work was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

Dr Rob Sansom, lead author of the paper explains: "Interpreting fossils is in some ways similar to forensic analysis we gather all the available clues to put together a scientific reconstruction of something that happened in the past. Unlike forensics, however, we are dealing with life from millions of years ago, and we are less interested in understanding the cause or the time of death. What we want to get at is what an animal was like before it died and, as with forensic analysis, knowing how the decomposition that took place after death altered the body provides important clues to its original anatomy"......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

November 20, 2009, 8:41 AM CT

Open-Ocean Settings During Mass Extinctions

University of Cincinnati professor of paleontology in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, and co-author Michael Foote of the University of Chicago publish their research in the Nov. 20 issue of Science with their paper, "Epicontinental Seas Versus Open-Ocean Settings: The Kinetics of Mass Extinction and Origination".

For a number of years, paleobiological scientists interested in the history of biodiversity have focused on charting the a number of ups (evolutionary radiations) and downs (mass extinctions) that punctuate the history of life. Because the preserved record of marine (sea-dwelling) animals is uncommonly extensive in comparison, say, to that of terrestrial animals such as dinosaurs, it's been easier to accurately calibrate the diversity and extinction records of marine organisms.

"Paleontologists now recognize that there were five especially large, worldwide mass extinction events during the history of life, known among the cognoscenti as 'The Big Five,'" says Miller. "Much ink in research journals has been spilled over the past few decades on papers investigating the causes of these events."

Eventhough scientists have long understood the potential value of "dissecting" mass extinctions, to ask whether some environments and organisms were affected more dramatically than others, little attention has been paid to a major dichotomy observed among marine sedimentary rocks and fossils: the distinction between epicontinental seas, which were broad shallow seas (typically less than 100 meters in depth) that once covered large regions of present-day continents, and open-ocean-facing coastlines, such as the continental shelves that rim a number of continents......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

November 17, 2009, 8:42 AM CT

Ancient Weapons Excavated in England

Staff at the University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS) have been excited by the results from a recently excavated major Prehistoric site at Asfordby, near Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire.

The Mesolithic site may date from as early as 9000BC, by which time hunter-gatherers had reoccupied the region after the last ice age. These hunters crossed the land bridge from the continental mainland -- 'Britain' was only to become an island several thousand years later.

The site was excavated during 2009 by ULAS in advance of a residential development for Jelson Homes Ltd. Initial trenching work identified several worked flint blades of characteristic Mesolithic type, and clearly in an unworn and undisturbed state. Further work confirmed that these rare flint finds were preserved in a Mesolithic soil, buried by a much later ploughsoil. Because this early soil had survived intact, it was thought possible that original features such as hearths and structures might still remain, and activities associated with the flint scatter could also be found.

Excavation targeted an area just ten metres square, where the limits of the flint scatter had been identified from test results. Within this small area, a charcoal rich former hearth was found, and also several postholes and arcs of stones that may show the position of tent-like structures. Burnt animal bone and further charcoal chips were also found indicating cooking activities. The site is probably located where it is at least partly because the local soils have natural flint chunks or 'nodules' that could have been used for flintworking. Also, the site would have been a shallow valley in Mesolithic times, and sheltered from the elements......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

November 11, 2009, 8:03 AM CT

Llinking Patagonia to New Guinea

Fossil plants are windows to the past, providing us with clues as to what our planet looked like millions of years ago. Not only do fossils tell us which species were present before human-recorded history, but they can provide information about the climate and how and when lineages may have dispersed around the world. Identifying fossil plants can be tricky, however, when plant organs fail to be preserved or when only a few sparse parts can be found.

In the recent issue of the American Journal of Botany (http://www.amjbot.org/cgi/content/full/96/11/2031), Peter Wilf (of Pennsylvania State University) and his U.S. and Argentine colleagues published their recent discovery of abundant fossilized specimens of a conifer previously known as "Libocedrus" prechilensis found in Argentinean Patagonia. This plant was first described in 1938 based on one fossil vegetative branch whose characteristics were said to most closely match those of a living South American dry, cold-climate conifer found in the study area: Austrocedrus (Libocedrus) chilensis, the Cordilleran Cypress.

However, numerous characteristics of the leaves, including their distinctive shape and stomatal arrangements, as well as seed cone details of the newly discovered specimens entirely match those of extant Papuacedrus, a closely related genus, currently found only in tropical, montane New Guinea and the Moluccas......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

November 5, 2009, 8:24 AM CT

Infamous conquistador through southeast

Archaeologists at Atlanta's Fernbank Museum of Natural History have discovered unprecedented evidence that helps map Hernando de Soto's journey through the Southeast in 1540. No evidence of De Soto's path between Tallahassee and North Carolina has been found until now, and few sites have been located anywhere.

Fernbank's Curator of Native American Archaeology, Dennis Blanton, has amassed an impressive collection of objects that reveal a probable stop in today's Telfair County, Ga., a location important not only for its critical mass of de Soto-era artifacts but also for its position off the previously predicted route. He'll present a scholarly paper before colleagues at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference on November 5 in Mobile, Ala.

"When we first started this excavation, I was surprised to learn there is no concrete evidence in Georgia of De Soto's path from Tallahassee to North Carolina. A single bead has been found here, a bead has been found there, but nothing of this nature," he said. "What we have now is the best-documented collection of Spanish artifacts in Georgia. A number of are unique and they are the only examples of certain artifacts ever found outside Florida".

The most significant findingsrare glass beads, metal artifacts and other objectsadd up to a heap of evidence that De Soto came calling near McRae, Ga. over 450 years ago. Because Native Americans did not have glass or metal before the arrival of Europeans, archaeologists look for these materials when documenting early explorers. Fernbank's site has both. Until now, a number of scholars expected De Soto's path to veer farther west, toward Macon......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 19, 2009, 6:48 AM CT

Fracture zones endanger tombs

Ancient choices made by Egyptians digging burial tombs may have led to today's problems with damage and curation of these precious archaeological treasures, but photography and detailed geological mapping should help curators protect the sites, as per a Penn State researcher.

"Previously, I noticed that some tomb entrances in the Valley of Kings, Luxor, Egypt, were aligned on fracture traces and their zones of fracture concentration," said Katarin A. Parizek, instructor in digital photography, department of integrative arts. "From my observations, it seems that tomb builders may have intentionally exploited these avenues of less resistant limestone when creating tombs".

Fracture traces are the above-ground indication of underlying zones of rock fracture concentrations. They can be between 5 and 40 feet wide, but average about 20 feet and can be as long as a mile. Lineaments are similar geological features that exceed one mile in length. Geologists suggest that fracture traces are good locations for drilling water wells and probably the highly fractured rock made it easier for the Egyptians to dig tombs.

Working with Richard R. Parizek, professor of geology and geoenvironmental engineering, Parizek has now looked at 33 of the 63 known tombs in the Valley of Kings. She reports her results today (Oct. 18) at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Or......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 15, 2009, 7:40 PM CT

New insights to ancient language

New technologies and academic collaborations are helping scholars at the University of Chicago analyze hundreds of ancient documents in Aramaic, one of the Middle East's oldest continuously spoken and written languages.

Members of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California are helping the University's Oriental Institute make very high-quality electronic images of nearly 700 Aramaic administrative documents. The Aramaic texts were incised in the surfaces of clay tablets with styluses or inked on the tablets with brushes or pens. Some tablets have both incised and inked texts.

Discovered in Iran, these tablets form one of the largest groups of ancient Aramaic records ever found. They are part of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, an immense group of administrative documents written and compiled about 500 B.C. at Persepolis, one of the capitals of the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Archaeologists from the Oriental Institute discovered the archive in 1933, and the Iranian government has loaned it to the Oriental Institute since 1936 for preservation, study, analysis and publication.

The Persepolis texts have started to provide scholars with new knowledge about Imperial Aramaic, the dialect used for international communication and record-keeping in a number of parts of the Assyrian, Babylonian and Persian empires, including parts of the administration at the imperial court of Persepolis. These texts have even greater value because they are so closely connected with documents written in other ancient languages by the same administration at Persepolis......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 15, 2009, 5:47 PM CT

Giant Impact Near India May Have Doomed Dinosaurs

A mysterious basin off the coast of India could be the largest, multi-ringed impact crater the world has ever seen. And if a newly released study is right, it may have been responsible for killing the dinosaurs off 65 million years ago.

Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University and a team of scientists took a close look at the massive Shiva basin, a submerged depression west of India that is intensely mined for its oil and gas resources. Some complex craters are among the most productive hydrocarbon sites on the planet. Chatterjee will present his research at this month's Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Oregon.

"If we are right, this is the largest crater known on our planet," Chatterjee said. "A bolide of this size, perhaps 40 kilometers (25 miles) in diameter creates its own tectonics".

By contrast, the object that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, and is usually thought to have killed the dinosaurs was between 8 and 10 kilometers (5 and 6.2 miles) wide.

It's hard to imagine such a cataclysm. But if the team is right, the Shiva impact vaporized Earth's crust at the point of collision, leaving nothing but ultra-hot mantle material to well up in its place. It is likely that the impact enhanced the nearby Deccan Traps volcanic eruptions that covered much of western India. What's more, the impact broke the Seychelles islands off of the Indian tectonic plate, and sent them drifting toward Africa......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 14, 2009, 7:03 AM CT

Thousands of bones unearthed reveal dino stomping ground

Imagine the gruesome sound of bones snapping as a thirsty, 30-ton dinosaur tramples a heap of fresh carcasses on his way to a rapidly shrinking lake.

That's the scene revealed by a painstaking analysis of thousands of bones unearthed near Moab, Utah by geologists from Brigham Young University.

So far the scientists have identified 67 individual dinosaurs representing 8 species and they have only scratched the surface of this diverse quarry. Mysteriously, nearly all of the 4,200 bones recovered so far are fractured, as published in the scientific journal Palaeo.

"Eventhough enough bones were recovered to assemble several complete dinosaurs, the vast majority of bones are broken to bits and pieces, just pulverized," said BYU professor Brooks Britt, main author on the study.

The scientists reconstructed how the bones got there and why they are in such bad shape.

The quarry, located immediately west of Arches National Park, contains dinosaurs of all sizes and ages, indicating a massive die-off event. The location of this dense cluster of bones near the shore of an ancient lake bed suggests a drought was the cause.

Yet the biggest puzzle was the cause of all the fractures. A closer look revealed that most of the breaks were angled "greenstick" fractures that occur in fresh bones......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 13, 2009, 8:01 AM CT

New Fossil Mammal

Paleontologists in the U.S. and China have discovered a new species of mammal that lived 123 million years ago in what is now the Liaoning Province in China. The newly discovered chipmunk-sized animal, named Maotherium asiaticus, was found in the famous fossil-rich beds of the Yixian Formation in China.

The fossil mammal, reported in this week's issue of the journal Science, offers an important clue to how the mammalian middle ear evolved. It represents an intermediate stage in the evolutionary process of how modern mammals acquired a middle ear structure.

Hearing is an important sensory function for humans, whether for listening to an interesting conversation or to beautiful music, says Zhe-Xi Luo, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pa., and an author of the Science paper. For mammals as a whole, Luo says, hearing is an evolutionary adaptation vital for survival.

"With a tiny and intricate middle ear structure, mammals have more sensitive hearing in a wider range of sounds than other vertebrates," says H. Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences. "This sensitive hearing was crucial for mammals to develop nocturnal adaptations and to survive in dinosaur-dominated times"......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 12, 2009, 7:14 AM CT

Banded rocks reveal earth secrets

The strikingly banded rocks scattered across the upper Midwest and elsewhere throughout the world are actually ambassadors from the past, offering clues to the environment of the early Earth more than 2 billion years ago.

Called banded iron formations or BIFs, these ancient rocks formed between 3.8 and 1.7 billion years ago at what was then the bottom of the ocean. The stripes represent alternating layers of silica-rich chert and iron-rich minerals like hematite and magnetite.

First mined as a major iron source for modern industrialization, BIFs are also a rich source of information about the geochemical conditions that existed on Earth when the rocks were made. However, interpreting their clues requires understanding how the bands formed, a topic that has been controversial for decades, says Huifang Xu, a geology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A study appearing today (Oct. 11) as an advance online publication in Nature Geoscience offers a new picture of how these colorful bands developed and what they reveal about the composition of the early ocean floor, seawater, and atmosphere during the evolution of the Earth.

Prior hypotheses about band formation involved seasonal fluctuations, temperature shifts, or periodic blooms of microorganisms, all of which left a number of open questions about how BIFs dominated the global marine landscape for two billion years and why they abruptly disappeared 1.7 billion years ago......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

October 9, 2009, 7:18 AM CT

Inside the first bird

The raptor-like Archaeopteryx has long been viewed as the archetypal first bird, but new research reveals that it was actually a lot less "bird-like" than scientists had believed.

In fact, the landmark study led by paleobiologist Gregory M. Erickson of The Florida State University has upended the iconic first-known-bird image of Archaeopteryx (from the Greek for "ancient wing"), which lived 150 million years ago during the Late Jurassic period in what is now Germany. Instead, the animal has been recast as more of a feathered dinosaur -- bird on the outside, dinosaur on the inside.

That's because new, microscopic images of the ancient cells and blood vessels inside the bones of the winged, feathered, claw-handed creature show unexpectedly slow growth and maturation that took years, similar to that found in dinosaurs, from which birds evolved. In contrast, living birds grow rapidly and mature in a matter of weeks.

Also groundbreaking is the finding that the rapid bone growth common to all living birds but surprisingly absent from the Archaeopteryx was not necessary for avian dinosaur flight.

The study is published in the Oct. 9, 2009, issue of the journal PLoS One In addition to Erickson, an associate professor in Florida State's Department of Biological Science and a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, co-authors include Florida State University biologist Brian D. Inouye and other U.S. scientists, as well as researchers from Germany and China.........

Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 7, 2009, 7:08 AM CT

A rare evidence of dinosaur cannibalism

University of Alberta researcher Phil Bell has found 70 million year old evidence of dinosaur cannibalism. The jawbone of what may be a Gorgosaurus was found in 1996 in southern Alberta. A technician at the Royal Tyrell Museum found something unusual embedded in the jaw. It was the tip of a tooth from another meat-eating dinosaur.

Bell, a paleontology PhD candidate, says discovery of the tooth shows that a fight between two dinosaurs definitely took place. "The wound showed no signs of healing so we know the dinosaur died soon after it was inflicted." Bell says that leaves two possible storylines. "Either the attacker fought, killed and ate this dinosaur, or the victim was already dead." Either way, if the attacker and the victim were the same species, Bell has a rare case of dinosaur cannibalism.

Analysis of the wound in the jawbone showed the bite was applied with the same force as a two tonne great white shark. "Sharks are a good analogue for this research," said Bell. "Their teeth frequently break off in an attack and become lodged in the victim."

The fossil record shows that Gorgosaurus, a 10-metre long cousin of the bigger, more famous, Tyrannosaurus rex, outnumbered other meat-eating dinosaurs in the area. That leads.

Bell to believe it's likely the attacker and the victim were both Gorgosaurus dinosaurs, making this a case of cannibalism......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 6, 2009, 11:08 PM CT

Oldest Hominid Skeleton

Nearly 17 years after plucking the fossilized tooth of a new human ancestor from a pebbly desert in Ethiopia, an international team of researchers today (Thursday, Oct. 1) announced their reconstruction of a partial skeleton of the hominid, Ardipithecus ramidus, which they say revolutionizes our understanding of the earliest phase of human evolution.

The female skeleton, nicknamed Ardi, is 4.4 million years old, 1.2 million years older than the skeleton of Lucy, or Australopithecus afarensis, the most famous and, until now, the earliest hominid skeleton ever found. Hominids are all fossil species closer to modern humans than to chimps and bonobos, which are our closest living relatives.

"This is the oldest hominid skeleton on Earth," said Tim White, University of California, Berkeley, professor of integrative biology and one of the co-directors of the Middle Awash Project, a team of 70 researchers that reconstructed the skeleton and other fossils found with it. "This is the most detailed snapshot we have of one of the earliest hominids and of what Africa was like 4.4 million years ago".

White and the team will publish the results of their analysis in 11 papers in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Science, which has Ardi on the cover. They announced their findings at press conferences held simultaneously today in Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 6, 2009, 11:04 PM CT

Key to Roman Population Mystery?

University of Connecticut theoretical biologist Peter Turchin and Stanford University ancient historian Walter Scheidel recently developed a new method to estimate population trends in ancient Rome and waded into an intense, ongoing debate about whether the state's population increased or declined after the first century B.C.

Using the region's abundance of coin hoards, bundles of buried Roman coins that citizens hid to protect their savings during times of violence and political strife, the scientists determined that Rome's population declined after 100 B.C. and suggested that the alternative scenario of robust population growth was highly implausible.

Turchin and Scheidel applied a unique blend of quantitative modeling and empirical testing normally found in the natural sciences to reach their conclusion. They reasoned that in times of violence people tend to hide their valuables, which are later recovered unless the owners are killed or driven away. As a result, clumps of unrecovered coin hoards are an excellent indicator of intense internal warfare, which has direct impacts on population size.

Debates concerning the population of ancient Rome during the first century B.C. are important because if the minority of adherents, who hold to population growth scenarios are correct, then much of current Roman history would need to be rewritten and it would have enormous impacts on views of the economic potential and social structure of ancient Rome......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

October 6, 2009, 11:01 PM CT

Answer to 150-Year-Old Evolution Question

Staying at home may have given the very first termite youngsters the best opportunity to rule the colony when their parents were killed by their neighbors. This is as per new research supported by the National Science Foundation and published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scientists say the incentive to remain home with siblings and inherit the parents' estate could be the missing link to a question posed nearly 150 years ago by evolution theorist Charles Darwin. He wondered how natural selection could favor traits that reduce reproductive success among worker offspring in highly social insects.

This is particularly curious because Darwin argued for small biological changes that result in greater chances of survival and successful reproduction over time. But social insects, ants, bees, wasps and termites colonies in particular can have over a million sterile and/or non-reproductive workers and soldiers, which seemed counterintuitive.

Research conducted by biologists at the University of Maryland, College Park shows that when two neighboring termite families meet within the same log, one or both families' kings and queens are killed and a new, merged, cooperative colony results. Replacement "junior" kings and queens then develop from either or both colonies' non-reproducing, worker offspring, and termites from the two families may even interbreed......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

September 15, 2009, 2:47 PM CT

Caistor skeleton mystifies archaeologists

A skeleton, found at one of the most important, but least understood, Roman sites in Britain is puzzling experts from The University of Nottingham.

Dr Will Bowden from the Department of Archaeology, who is leading excavations at the buried town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk, said the burial was highly unusual: "This is an abnormal burial. The body, which is probably male, was placed in a shallow pit on its side, as opposed to being laid out properly. This is not the care Romans normally accorded to their dead. It could be that the person was murdered or executed eventhough this is still a matter of speculation".

The skeleton has been removed for further investigation. Dr Bowden said: "It is an exciting find and once we have cleaned the bones they will undergo a full examination and a range of scientific tests to try and find out how this individual died".

The Caistor excavations, sponsored by the Foyle Foundation, May Gurney, the Roman Research Trust and South Norfolk Council, have also found evidence of Iron Age as well as early prehistoric occupation some 10,000 years BC. Dr Bowden said: "These excavations have added an enormous amount to what we knew before. There are flints so sharp you could still shave with them - they are so fresh they have barely moved in all that time"......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source

August 26, 2009, 7:02 AM CT

Evidence of iridescence in 40 million-year-old feather fossil

Known for their wide variety of vibrant plumage, birds have evolved various chemical and physical mechanisms to produce these beautiful colors over millions of years. A team of paleontologists and ornithologists led by Yale University has now discovered evidence of vivid iridescent colors in feather fossils more than 40 million years old.

The finding, published online August 26 in Biology Letters, signifies the first evidence of a preserved color-producing nanostructure in a fossilized feather.

Iridescence is the quality of changing color depending on the angle of observation, such as the rainbow of colors seen in an oil slick. The simplest iridescent feather colors are produced by light scattering off the feather's surface and a smooth surface of melanin pigment granules within the feather protein. Examining feather fossils from the Messel Shale in Gera number of with an electron microscope, researchers have documented this smooth layer of melanin structures, called melanosomes.

"These feathers produced a black background with a metallic greenish, bluish or coppery color at certain anglesmuch like the colors we see in starlings and grackles today," said Richard Prum, chair of the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale and one of the paper's authors......... Posted by: William      Read more         Source