Archive for December, 2017

WFS news: Dinosaur parasites trapped in 100-million-year-old amber tell blood-sucking story

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Fossilised ticks discovered trapped and preserved in amber show that these parasites sucked the blood of feathered dinosaurs almost 100 million years ago, according to a new article published in Nature Communications today. Sealed inside a piece of 99 million-year-old Burmese amber researchers found a so-called hard tick […]

WFS News: Rhaeticosaurus mertensi fossil gives clues to life in ancient oceans

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Source: Article By Helen Briggs ,BBC News A new fossil is shedding light on the murky past of the sea reptiles that swam at the time of the dinosaurs. With tiny heads on long necks and four pointed flippers, plesiosaurs have been likened to Scotland’s mythical Loch Ness […]

WFS News: Fossil hunters find bones of human-sized penguin on New Zealand beach

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev The remnants of an ancient penguin that stood as tall as a human have been found encased in rock on a beach in New Zealand. Fossil hunters chanced upon the prehistoric bones in sedimentary rock that formed 55m to 60m years ago on what is now Hampden beach […]

WFS News: Los Angeles construction unearths ‘rare’ fossil trove

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev The fossilized remains of creatures that roamed southern California 10,000 years ago were discovered by a crew digging for a subway extension under the busy streets of Los Angeles. Ashley Leger works for a company contracted by Los Angeles transportation officials to keep paleontologists on hand as the […]

WFS News:Wakaleo schouteni,New species of extinct marsupial lion

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev A team of Australian scientists has discovered a new species of marsupial lion which has been extinct for at least 19 million years. The findings, published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, are based on fossilised remains of the animal’s skull, teeth, and humerus (upper arm bone) found […]

WFS News: Recently discovered fossil shows transition of a reptile from life on land to life in the sea

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Using modern research tools on a 155-million-year-old reptile fossil, scientists at Johns Hopkins and the American Museum of Natural History report they have filled in some important clues to the evolution of animals that once roamed land and transitioned to life in the water. A report on the […]

WFS News: Synchrotron scanning reveals amphibious ecomorphology in a new clade of bird-like dinosaurs

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev An exceptionally well-preserved dinosaur skeleton from Mongolia unites an unexpected combination of features that defines a new group of semi-aquatic predators related to Velociraptor. Detailed 3D synchrotron analysis allowed an international team of researchers to present the bizarre 75 million-year-old predator, named Halszkaraptor escuilliei, in Nature. The study […]

WFS News: Early avian evolution: The Archaeopteryx that wasn‘t

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Paleontologists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich correct a case of misinterpretation: The first fossil “Archaeopteryx” to be discovered is actually a predatory dinosaur belonging to the anchiornithid family, which was previously known only from finds made in China. Even 150 million years after its first appearance on our […]

WFS News: Gravity Signals to Measure Strong Earthquakes

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev After an earthquake, there is a disturbance in the field of gravity almost instantaneously. This could be recorded before the seismic waves that seismologists usually analyze. In a study published in Science on December 1, 2017, a team formed of researchers from CNRS, IPGP, the Université Paris Diderot […]

WFS News: Scientists reveals an event of active ‘drip’ tectonics

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev When renowned University of Toronto (U of T) geophysicist J. Tuzo Wilson cemented concepts in the emerging field of plate tectonics in the 1960s, he revolutionized the study of Earth’s physical characteristics and behaviours. Decades later, successor researchers at U of T and Istanbul Technical University have determined […]