For around 50 million years, placodonts populated the flat coastal regions of the Tethys Ocean, in modern day Europe and China. The most distinctive feature of these dinosaurs was their teeth: The upper jaw had two rows of flattened teeth – one on the palate and one on the jawbone – while the lower jaw […]
Archive for March, 2013
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General Patterns of Diversity in Major Marine Microeukaryote Lineages
March 30th, 2013 
Riffin Microeukaryotes have vital roles for the functioning of marine ecosystems, but still some general characteristics of their current diversity and phylogeny remain unclear. Here we investigated both aspects in major oceanic microeukaryote lineages using 18S rDNA (V4–V5 hypervariable regions) sequences from public databases that derive from various marine environmental surveys. A very carefully and manually […]
Mass Extinctions And The Evolution Of Dinosaurs
March 29th, 2013 Riffin Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and 50 million years before taking over the world and dominating ecosystems, according to new research published this week. Reporting in Biology Letters, Steve Brusatte, Professor Michael Benton, and colleagues at the University of Bristol show that dinosaurs did not proliferate immediately after they originated, but that their rise was […]
New Fossil Species from a Fish-Eat-Fish World When Limbed Animals Evolved
March 28th, 2013 Riffin Scientists who famously discovered the lobe-finned fish fossil Tiktaalik roseae, a species with some of the clearest evidence of the evolutionary transition from fish to limbed animals, have described another new species of predatory fossil lobe-finned fish fish from the same time and place. By describing more Devonian species, they’re gaining a greater understanding of […]
Oxygen-Poor ‘Boring’ Ocean Challenged Evolution of Early Life
March 27th, 2013 Riffin A research team led by biogeochemists at the University of California, Riverside has filled in a billion-year gap in our understanding of conditions in the early ocean during a critical time in the history of life on Earth. It is now well accepted that appreciable oxygen first accumulated in the atmosphere about 2.4 to 2.3 […]
WFS Profiles : Barnum Brown (1873-1963)
March 26th, 2013 Riffin Barnum Brown has been called the greatest “bone hunter” of all time, as well as the last of the great dinosaur hunters. A forward thinking scientist with a successful career, Brown is most famous for discovering the king of the dinosaurs, which was aptly named Tyrannosaurus rex, or the “king of the tyrant lizards.” But […]
Megavolcanoes Tied to Pre-Dinosaur Mass Extinction: Apparent Sudden Climate Shift Could Have Analog Today
March 25th, 2013 Riffin Scientists examining evidence across the world from New Jersey to North Africa say they have linked the abrupt disappearance of half of earth’s species 200 million years ago to a precisely dated set of gigantic volcanic eruptions. The eruptions may have caused climate changes so sudden that many creatures were unable to adapt — possibly […]
Structural Extremes in a Cretaceous Dinosaur
March 24th, 2013 Riffin Fossils of the Early Cretaceous dinosaur, Nigersaurus taqueti, document for the first time the cranial anatomy of a rebbachisaurid sauropod. Its extreme adaptations for herbivory at ground-level challenge current hypotheses regarding feeding function and feeding strategy among diplodocoids, the larger clade of sauropods that includes Nigersaurus. We used high resolution computed tomography, stereolithography, and standard […]
Fossil Bird Study On Extinction Patterns Could Help Today’s Conservation Efforts
March 23rd, 2013 Riffin A new University of Florida study of nearly 5,000 Haiti bird fossils shows contrary to a commonly held theory, human arrival 6,000 years ago didn’t cause the island’s birds to die simultaneously. Although many birds perished or became displaced during a mass extinction event following the first arrival of humans to the Caribbean islands, fossil […]
Scientists Discover ‘Lubricant’ for Earth’s Tectonic Plates: Hidden Magma Layer Could Play Role in Earthquakes
March 21st, 2013 Riffin Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have found a layer of liquefied molten rock in Earth’s mantle that may be acting as a lubricant for the sliding motions of the planet’s massive tectonic plates. The discovery may carry far-reaching implications, from solving basic geological functions of the planet to a better […]
