fossil

Australopithecus sediba had plant foods on the menu
06/28/2012 - 06:56

For the first time, researchers have found plant remains in the two-million-year-old dental plaque of ancient hominins’ teeth. The first direct evidence of what our earliest ancestors actually ate has been discovered due to a two-million-year-old mishap that befell two early members of the human family tree. Amanda Henry of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and co-workers determined the diet of these hominins by looking at patterns of dental wear and analysing tiny plant fragments on their teeth.

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Ancient Giant Turtle Fossil Revealed
05/18/2012 - 10:36

Picture a turtle the size of a Smart car, with a shell large enough to double as a kiddie pool. Paleontologists from North Carolina State University have found just such a specimen – the fossilized remains of a 60-million-year-old South American giant that lived in what is now Colombia.

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Largest known crocodile identified
05/04/2012 - 16:50

A crocodile large enough to swallow humans once lived in East Africa, according to a University of Iowa researcher. "It’s the largest known true crocodile,” says Christopher Brochu, associate professor of geoscience. “It may have exceeded 27 feet in length. By comparison, the largest recorded Nile crocodile was less than 21 feet, and most are much smaller.”

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Jurassic pain: Giant “flea-like” insects plagued dinosaurs
05/01/2012 - 22:25

It takes a gutsy insect to sneak up on a huge dinosaur while it sleeps, crawl onto its soft underbelly and give it a bite that might have felt like a needle going in – but giant “flea-like” animals, possibly the oldest of their type ever discovered, probably did just that. And a few actually lived through the experience, based on the discovery by Chinese scientists of remarkable fossils of these creatures, just announced in Current Biology, a professional journal.

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Did bone ease acid for early land crawlers?
04/25/2012 - 07:36

In a new paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists propose that the bony structures in the skin of many early four-legged creatures might have been there to relieve acid buildup in bodily fluids. Analysis of their anatomy suggests that as they ventured out of water, the animals would have had trouble getting rid of enough CO2 to prevent acid buildup.

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University of Florida scientists name new ancient camels from Panama Canal excavation
02/29/2012 - 12:08

The discovery of two new extinct camel species by University of Florida scientists sheds new light on the history of the tropics, a region containing more than half the world's biodiversity and some of its most important ecosystems.

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