Queensland paleontologists have discovered that the world’s only recorded dinosaur stampede is largely made up of the tracks of swimming rather than running animals. The University of Queensland’s (UQ) PhD candidate Anthony Romilio led the study of thousands of small dinosaur tracks at Lark Quarry Conservation Park, central-western Queensland. Mr Romilio says the 95-98 million-year-old […]
Archive for January, 2013
Australia’s Stampeding Dinosaurs Take a Dip: Largely Tracks of Swimming Rather Than Running Animals
January 18th, 2013 
Riffin The Completeness of the Fossil Record of Mesozoic Birds: Implications for Early Avian Evolution
January 17th, 2013 Riffin Many palaeobiological analyses have concluded that modern birds (Neornithes) radiated no earlier than the Maastrichtian, whereas molecular clock studies have argued for a much earlier origination. Here, we assess the quality of the fossil record of Mesozoic avian species, using a recently proposed character completeness metric which calculates the percentage of phylogenetic characters that can […]
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Tags: Mesozoic Birds, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society 
2 Comments »Scientists reassemble the backbone of life with a particle accelerator synchrotron X-rays
January 16th, 2013 Riffin Scientists have been able to reconstruct, for the first time, the intricate three-dimensional structure of the backbone of early tetrapods, the earliest four-legged animals. High-energy X-rays and a new data extraction protocol allowed the researchers to reconstruct the backbones of the 360 million year old fossils in exceptional detail and shed new light on how […]
Low Extinction Rates Made California a Refuge for Diverse Plant Species
January 14th, 2013 Riffin The remarkable diversity of California’s plant life is largely the result of low extinction rates over the past 45 million years, according to a new study published in the journal Evolution. Although many new species have evolved in California, the rate at which plant lineages gave rise to new species has not been notably higher […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Plant Species Extinction, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society 2 Comments »Tropical Collapse in Early Triassic Caused by Lethal Heat: Extreme Temperatures Blamed for ‘Dead Zone’
January 13th, 2013 Riffin Scientists have discovered why the ‘broken world’ following the worst extinction of all time lasted so long — it was simply too hot to survive. The end-Permian mass extinction, which occurred around 250 million years ago in the pre-dinosaur era, wiped out nearly all the world’s species. Typically, a mass extinction is followed by a […]
Study Reveals Jurassic Ecosystems Were Similar to Modern: Animals Flourish Among Lush Plants
January 12th, 2013 Riffin Typically researchers count the number of animal species discovered in a region to determine how many different types of animals once lived there. Scientists call that a measure of faunal richness. Myers took a different approach. Using a traditional method typically used to estimate carbon dioxide in the ancient atmosphere, Myers instead applied it to […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Jurassic Ecosystem, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Giant Fossil Predator Provides Insights Into the Rise of Modern Marine Ecosystem Structures
January 8th, 2013 Riffin An international team of scientists has described a fossil marine predator measuring 8.6 meters in length (about 28 feet) recovered from the Nevada desert in 2010 as representing the first top predator in marine food chains feeding on prey similar to its own size. A paper with their description will appear the week of Jan. […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Fossil Predators, ichthyosaurs, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Sea Temperatures Less Sensitive to CO2 13 Million Years Ago
January 7th, 2013 Riffin In the modern global climate, higher levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere are associated with rising ocean temperatures. But the seas were not always so sensitive to this CO2 “forcing,” according to a new report. Around 5 to 13 million years ago, oceans were warmer than they are today — even though atmospheric […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Pre historic ocean, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Fossil scars capture dinosaur headbutts
January 6th, 2013 Riffin With domed heads and thick, bony skull protuberances, pachycephalosaurids are well known by seven-year-olds and palaeontologists alike. The dinosaurs are thought to have used their thick domes to headbutt each other, perhaps as part of courtship behaviour. But whereas children recreating these vicious displays simply ram plastic models of the animals together in a straight […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Pachycephalosaurids, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Origin of Photosynthesis Revealed by a ‘Living Fossil’
January 5th, 2013 Riffin Recently, the complete genome of a glaucophyte alga (Cyanophora paradoxa) has been unraveled by an international consortium led by Dr. Debashish Bhattacharya from Rutgers University (USA). From the University of Freiburg, Dr. Stefan Rensing and Aikaterini Symeonidi (Faculty of Biology), contributed to the analysis of the genome by performing classification and phylogenomic analyses of the […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Photosynthesis, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »
