Tag archives for fossils
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The top 10 stories on our radar today: Scientists have created stem cells from cloned human embryos, 1.5-billion-year-old water has been found in a deep Canadian mine, and…
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A cluster of tapeworm eggs have been discovered in 270 million-year-old fossilized shark feces, suggesting that the intestinal parasites are much older than previously thought.
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Nine million years ago, an almost unimaginable-to-humans living situation arose in the woodlands of central Spain. There, the fossil record shows that saber-toothed cats and bear dogs were cohabitating—sharing food and living space and challenging the very stereotypes we hold about cats and dogs today. A team of paleontologists from the University of Michigan,…
Sea Monsters of the North: Day 2
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 7, 2012 
The search for sea monster fossils in the frozen north continues, and in a matter of hours the team has found more specimens than the rest of the world will find in the next couple of years.
Posted by America’s best idea just got better, with the announcement today of an addition of some 40 square miles of fossil-rich lands to the U.S. Petrified Forest National Park (PFNP).
Spitsbergen Expedition: Grand Finale
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 16, 2011 
After two weeks excavating ancient “sea monster” fossils above the Arctic Circle, NG Emerging Explorer Jørn Hurum and his team pull one last set of bones from the Earth and bid farewell to a site like none other.
Spitsbergen Expedition: Final Excavation
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 15, 2011 
As the annual field expedition searching for Arctic sea monster fossils draws to a close, the team must decide which sites to excavate, and which to leave for future expeditions. And of course, there’s another snow storm to deal with.
Spitsbergen Expedition: Fossil Hunting in a Snow Storm
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 13, 2011 
With limited time for the expedition, the team must continue the work searching for and excavating fossils despite the sudden arrival of a bitterly cold and wet Arctic snow storm.
Spitsbergen Expedition: Ancient “Flipper’s” Flipper
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 10, 2011 
Excavations continue at Emerging Explorer Jørn Hurum’s fossil finding expedition, as the weather turns surprisingly warm, and the flipper of a dolphin-like ichthyosaur is revealed by a team member on video.
Spitsbergen Expedition: More Fossil Finds and a “How-To” Lesson
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 9, 2011 
As the team hits the one-week mark, new discoveries continue to be made, and the team reveals how to plaster a fossil find. (Useful information to have, next time you’re digging through shale in the arctic.)
Spitsbergen Expedition: Animals Big and Small
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 8, 2011 
A nearby polar bear puts the team on high-alert, as plesiosaur excavations continue, and sea urchin fossils are discovered just outside camp.
Spitsbergen Expedition: Plastering Fossil “Sea Monsters”
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 7, 2011 
Jørn Hurum’s team revels in the chance to play with plaster, as the fossils of ancient “sea monsters” are preserved after the first few days of excavations in Svalbard.
Spitsbergen Expedition: This Is Where the Fun Starts!
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 5, 2011 
In the third update from 2011 Emerging Explorer Jørn Hurum’s fossil-finding expedition in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, the team identifies several 150-million-year-old “sea monsters”.
Spitsbergen Expedition 2011: Day 2
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 4, 2011 
In the second update from 2011 Emerging Explorer Jørn Hurum’s fossil-finding expedition in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, the team begins to uncover the first new fossils of the season.
Spitsbergen Expedition 2011: Day 1
Posted by Jørn Hurum of National Geographic Emerging Explorers in Explorers Journal on August 3, 2011 
For the next two weeks, 2011 Emerging Explorer Jørn Hurum will be leading an expedition to Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, continuing the work that has yielded many spectacular fossils through the years. In the first update, the team sets up camp wary of large numbers of polar bears in the area.
Posted by David W. Krause is Distinguished Service Professor in Stony Brook University’s Department of Anatomical Sciences. For well over a decade he has led a groundbreaking field investigation of the fossils of the African island of Madagascar — a paleontologist’s paradise — due to the fossils’ state of preservation and the island’s role in the plate…
Posted by The Journal of Cosmology is at it again. Hot on the heels of their recent issue supporting a one-way human mission to Mars, the journal has published a paper by a NASA researcher who says he’s found evidence of bacteria-esque microfossils in meteorites recovered from France and Tanzania. A long, winding filament inside the Orgueil…
By Hans-Dieter Sues Charles Darwin noted that the oldest fossils known in his day already represented quite complex life forms such as trilobites, an immensely diverse group of extinct marine arthropods most closely related to horseshoe crabs, spiders, and their relatives. We now date these remains as middle Early Cambrian in age. Because Darwin assumed…
By Hans-Dieter Sues The oldest known birds, classified in the genus Archaeopteryx, lived near the end of the Jurassic Period (145.5 to 150.8 million years ago). Although Archaeopteryx has a fully developed plumage its skeleton still retains many features of its dinosaurian precursors, one of which is jaws with teeth. With the exception of some…
A remarkable new discovery redates the evolutionary split between the Old World monkeys and the ape-human lineage. By Hans-Dieter Sues The higher primates of the Old World (Catarrhini) are divided into two major lineages, one comprising the living monkeys of Africa, Asia, and Europe and their fossil relatives (Cercopithecoidea), and the other, humans, great apes,…
By Hans-Dieter Sues In the movie The Lost World (1997), the eccentric chaos theoretician Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) remarked on the all-too-soon apparent instability of the “Jurassic Park” world: “Life will find a way.” It always does. Some animals and plants make a living in almost unimaginably weird ways. For an evolutionary biologist like…
By Hans-Dieter Sues When the first humans crossed the Bering Strait into North America they encountered a hunter’s paradise, with mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, and a variety of large ungulates for the taking. However, they also came face-to-face with some of the most fearsome predators of all time. The dire wolf was larger and more…
By James G. Robertson, National Geographic Digital Media Large algae blooms could have been a major contributing factor to the last five mass extinctions and smaller die-offs throughout history, researchers at Clemson University announced yesterday, challenging the theories that a major cataclysmic event, like an asteroid strike, alone caused the extinctions. Today, a change in…
The Cretaceous pterosaur Anhanguera (wingspan 9-13 feet) cutaway above shows lungs (red), air sacs associated with the neck (green) and with the wings (blue). Below: life reconstruction of Anhanguera. Illustration by Mark Witton, University of Portsmouth Balloon-like air sacs, which extended from the lungs throughout the body, hollowing out many bones, paved the way for…
We all know about the size of dinosaurs, of course, but how about a rodent the size of a bull, a sea scorpion bigger than a man, a frog as large as a beach ball, a penguin the size of a small adult human, a 1,000-pound ground-sloth-like marsupial, and a shark that may have grown longer than…
