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rewriting Late Bronze Age Mediterranean history
Cultural links between the Aegean and Near Eastern civilizations will have to be reconsidered: A new Cornell University radiocarbon study of tree rings and seeds shows that the Santorini (or Thera) volcanic eruption, a central event in Aegean prehistory, occurred about 100 years earlier than previously thought. The study team was led by Sturt Manning, a professor of classics and the incoming director of the Malcolm and Carolyn Wiener Laboratory for Aegean and Near Eastern Dendrochronology at Cornell. The team's findings are the cover story in the latest issue of Science (April 28). The findings, which place the Santorini eruption in the late 17th century B.C., not 100 years later as long believed, may lead to a critical rewriting of Late Bronze Age history of Mediterranean civilizations that flourished about 3,600 years ago, Manning said. The Santorini volcano, one of the largest eruptions in history, buried towns but left archaeological evidence in the surrounding Aegean Sea region. As a major second millennium B.C. event, the Santorini eruption has been a logical point for researchers to align Aegean and Near Eastern chronology, eventhough the exact date of the eruption was not known......... Posted by: William Permalink Source Insights Into 'banana-jawed' Fossil Mammal
Elwyn Simons of Duke Lemur Center examines fossil specimin - Megan Morr
By painstakingly measuring hundreds of specimens of a fossil mammal called Thyrohyrax, recovered from the famous fossil beds of Egypt's Fayum Province, the scientists determined that males of this now-extinct species -- and only males -- had oversized, swollen lower jaws shaped much like a banana. Further, the team speculated, the animals may have used the balloonlike structural chamber that shaped their bizarre jaws to produce sound. If this speculation is correct, Thryohyrax and its fossil relatives would be the only mammals found so far to use such a skeletal structure for producing sound, the scientists said. They added that some dinosaurs are thought to have used similar sound-producing mechanisms. The scientists published their findings in the recent issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was released in mid-April. The study's lead author is Donald DeBlieux, a former research associate at the Duke Lemur Center (formerly the Primate Center) who is now at the Utah Geological Survey. Other team members from Duke include Elwyn Simons, head of the Division of Fossils at the Duke Lemur Center; Prithijit Chatrath, curator of the division; and Michael Baumrind, a former undergraduate anthropology student who initiated the research as a senior project. Yousry Attia of the Egyptian Geological Survey also took part in the study......... Posted by: William Permalink Source Series Explores Ships Lost At Sea
Sidescan sonar image of ship wreck in lower Patuxent River. It is believed that the stern is missing at the top of the image and the bow is toward the bottom.
David Bright, Penn State alumnus and president of Nautical Research Group, Inc. of New Jersey, will present a multifaceted view of the Andrea Doria from her initial planning and construction to salvage dives in the 260 feet of cold North Atlantic waters. The Andrea Doria was an Italian steamship with 1705 passengers and crew on board that was struck in fog off the coast of Rhode Island by the Swedish-American liner Stockholm. The ship was traveling from Genoa, Italy to New York City in 1956. The 29,000-ton liner sank in 11 hours. Bright is an experienced shipwreck historian and deep technical diver. He studied the Titanic for more than 30 years and in 2003 and 2005, as part of scientific research, dove 3 miles to the wreck site of the ship on the Atlantic floor. He has studied the degradation of the ship caused by increased microbial activity. He has also worked on the wreck of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor. He is considered the foremost historical authority on the Andrea Doria......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Drilling Into Fossil Magma Chamber
The scientists, affiliated with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), published their findings on April 20 in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. Eventhough gabbro has been sampled elsewhere in the oceans where faulting and tectonic movements have brought it closer to the seafloor, this is the first time gabbro has been recovered from intact ocean crust. The borehole into the magma chamber took nearly five months to drill, and mandatory the use of twenty-five hardened steel and tungsten carbide drill bits. Getting there "is a rare opportunity to calibrate geophysical measurements with direct observations of real rocks," said geophysicist Doug Wilson of the University of California at Santa Barbara, lead author on the Science Express paper. "Finding the right place to drill was probably the key to this success". Wilson and his IODP colleagues found that place by identifying a region of the Pacific Ocean that formed some 15 million years ago when the East Pacific Rise was spreading at a "superfast" rate of more than 200 millimeters per year, faster than any mid-ocean ridge on Earth today......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Ancient Earthworks Electronically Rebuilt,
Birds-eye view of how the earthworks at Marietta, Ohio, might have looked before the town grew up around them.
A few are still extant - Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, for example - but most of the region's ancient architecture was all but squandered. Earthworks, from as early as 600 BC that stretched over miles and rose to heights of 15 feet or more, were either gouged out or plowed under in the 19th century or paved over for development in the 20th. But now, this lost heritage from the Adena, Hopewell and Fort Ancient cultures is returning in the form of a traveling exhibit that will include virtual reconstructions of earthworks from 39 sites. The electronic recreations represent nearly ten years of work by an extensive team of architects, archaeologists, historians, technical experts and Native Americans. Project director is John Hancock, professor of architecture at the University of Cincinnati, working in partnership with the Center for the Reconstruction of Historical and Archaeological Sites (CERHAS) at the University of Cincinnati. The title of the project and the coming traveling exhibit is: "EarthWorks: Virtual Explorations of the Ancient Ohio Valley"......... Posted by: William Permalink Source Lunar Rocks Suggest Meteorite Shower
The idea that meteorites have hammered the moon's surface isn't news to scientists. The lunar surface is pock-marked with large craters carved out by the impact of crashing asteroids and meteorites, said Robert Duncan, a professor and associate dean in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. But the narrow range of the impact dates suggests to scientists that a large spike in meteorite activity took place during a 100-million year interval - possibly the result of collisions in the asteroid belt with comets coming from just beyond our solar system. Results of the study are being published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, the journal of the international Meteoritical Society. Co-authors with Duncan are Marc Norman of the Australian National University and John Huard, also an oceanographer at OSU. The study was funded by NASA. Tiny melted fragments from the lunar rocks were dated at the noble gas geochronology laboratory at Oregon State. Duncan and Huard were able to use radiometric dating techniques to determine when the rocks had melted after being struck by meteorites. What is especially intriguing, Duncan says, is that this apparent spike in meteorite activity took place about 3.8 to 4 billion years ago - an era that roughly coincides with when researchers believe life first began on Earth, as evidenced by the fossil record of primitive one-cell bacteria......... Posted by: Brooke Permalink Source How Preservation Distorts History Of Life On Earth
An outcrop of 20-million-year-old fossil shells on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. Paleontologists have published a detailed, global study of clam preservation intended to determine what's missing from the fossil record and why.
"Everyone talks about how imperfect the fossil record is, but not a number of people do anything about it," said David Jablonski, the William Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. "We're not doing this for the sake of knowing more about clams, but for knowing more about how to answer biological questions in the fossil record more rigorously." Jablonski co-authored the study along with James Valentine, University of California, Berkeley; Susan Kidwell, University of Chicago; and Kaustuv Roy, University of California, San Diego. Their study, funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, appears in the April 10-14 Online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The findings will help researchers link the recent fossil record with modern biodiversity to better understand the role of humans in bringing about change in patterns of life on Earth, said Kidwell, the William Rainey Harper Professor in Geophysical Sciences. "This gives us some strategies for how to zero in on the most reliable data," she said......... Posted by: William Permalink Source Ants Arose 140-168 Million Years Ago
But these resilient insects, now found in terrestrial ecosystems the world over, apparently began to diversify only about 100 million years ago in concert with the flowering plants, the scientists say. "This study integrates numerous fossil records and a large molecular data set to infer the evolutionary radiation of ants, which have deeper roots than we thought," said Chuck Lydeard, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research. The study was also supported by the Green Fund. Led by biologists Corrie Moreau and Naomi Pierce of Harvard University, the researchers reconstructed the ant family tree using DNA sequencing of six genes from 139 representative ant genera, encompassing 19 of 20 ant subfamilies around the world. "Ants are a dominant feature of nearly all terrestrial ecosystems, and yet we know surprisingly little about their evolutionary history: the major groupings of ants, how they are related to each other, and when and how they arose," said Moreau. "We now have a clear picture of how this extraordinarily dominant - in ecological terms - and successful - in evolutionary terms - group of insects originated and diversified"......... Posted by: William Permalink Source Filling the Evolutionary Gap Between Fish and Land Animals
Credit: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation
The new species has a skull, neck, ribs, and parts of a fin that resemble the earliest limbed animals, called tetrapods. But the creature also has fins and scales like a fish. "This animal is both fish and tetrapod. We jokingly call it a fishapod," said Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago. He and paleontologists from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University conducted the research. They report the finding in two papers published this week in the journal Nature. "Paleontologists have known that animals first appeared on land in the Devonian Period," said Richard Lane, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s division of earth sciences, which funded the research. "To reach this evolutionary milestone, a skeletal progression from fish to land-roaming tetrapods would have been needed. Now we have new evidence of that progression". The back of the animal's skull, neck, ribs and fins "are especially tetrapod-like while the snout, lower jaws, and scale-cover are similar to those seen in closely related fish," Shubin said. The animal was a predator with sharp teeth, a crocodile-like head and a flattened body......... Posted by: William Permalink Source Another Dinosaur Fossil Find
This photograph of Spinosaurus dinosaur bones that Josh Smith found in a German museum is the only photographic proof of German researcher Ernst Stromer's discovery of Spinosaurus, a dinosaur similar in size to the famed Tyranosaurus rex. All but Stromer's drawings of his find were lost when the Allies bombed out the Munich museum where the materials were held. The photo is significantly historically but also as a comparison of Stromer's drawing for a bettter understanding of the species' skeleton.
In the early 20th century, Stromer discovered four new species of dinosaurs, including the predator Spinosaurus, similar in size to the famed Tyrannosaurus rex. Stromer returned to Munich with the fossils, maps and details of his discovery, but all was lost in 1944 when the Allies bombed out the museum where the materials were held. Enter Josh Smith, Ph.D., assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Writing in a recent issue of the Journal of Paleontology, Smith reports the rediscovery of two photographs of the holotype of Spinosaurus aegyptiacus as it was reposited in the Palaontologische Staatssammlung Munchen previous to 1944, and later presumably lost in the Allied bombing. In June, 2000, while researching in Gera number of, Smith happened upon the photographs in the Palaontologische archives of the Museum, after Ernst Stromer's son, Wolfgang Stromer, donated them to the museum in 1995. "These are, to our knowledge, the only surviving photographs of this, the one irrefutable specimen of S. aegyptiacus, which, previous to the initial print releases, has only been represented by Stromer's drawings," said Smith. "This is a significant find from the perspective of the history of paleontology."........ Posted by: William Permalink Source |
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