A radical shortening of their bony tails over 100 million years ago enabled the earliest birds to develop versatile legs that gave them an evolutionary edge, a new study shows. A team led by Oxford University scientists examined fossils of the earliest birds from the Cretaceous Period, 145-66 million years ago, when early birds, such […]
Archive for August, 2013
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Fossil of History’s Most Successful Mammal: Prehistoric ‘Rodent’ May Have Set the Stage for Life in Trees, Herbivorous Diets
August 17th, 2013 
Riffin The 160 million-year-old fossil of an extinct rodent-like creature from China is helping to explain how multituberculates — the most evolutionarily successful and long-lived mammalian lineage in the fossil record — achieved their dominance. This fossil find — the oldest ancestor in the multituberculate family tree — represents a newly discovered species known as Rugosodon […]
Slow Earthquakes May Foretell Larger Events
August 16th, 2013 Riffin Monitoring slow earthquakes may provide a basis for reliable prediction in areas where slow quakes trigger normal earthquakes, according to Penn State geoscientists. “We currently don’t have any way to remotely monitor when land faults are about to move,” said Chris Marone, professor of geophysics. “This has the potential to change the game for earthquake […]
Woolly Mammoth DNA Adapted for Ice Age Survival
August 15th, 2013 Riffin Genetics researchers may not clone a woolly mammoth any time soon but they are learning much about the ice age creatures by studying their DNA. One recent study sequenced the gene for mammoth hemoglobin, a red blood cell protein that allows blood to carry oxygen around the body. The trouble is, hemoglobin function begins to […]
Dating Oldest Known Petroglyphs in North America
August 14th, 2013 Riffin A new high-tech analysis led by a University of Colorado Boulder researcher shows the oldest known petroglyphs in North America, which are cut into several boulders in western Nevada, date to at least 10,500 years ago and perhaps even as far back as 14,800 years ago. The petroglyphs located at the Winnemucca Lake petroglyph site […]
The ‘Genetics of Sand’ May Shed New Light On Evolutionary Process Over Millions of Years
August 13th, 2013 Riffin An evolutionary ecologist at the University of Southampton, is using ‘grains of sand’ to understand more about the process of evolution. Dr Thomas Ezard is using the fossils of microscopic aquatic creatures called planktonic foraminifera, often less than a millimetre in size, which can be found in all of the world’s oceans. The remains of […]
Molecular and Paleontological Evidence for a Post-Cretaceous Origin of Rodents
August 12th, 2013 Riffin The timing of the origin and diversification of rodents remains controversial, due to conflicting results from molecular clocks and paleontological data. The fossil record tends to support an early Cenozoic origin of crown-group rodents. In contrast, most molecular studies place the origin and initial diversification of crown-Rodentia deep in the Cretaceous, although some molecular analyses […]
Fresh Analysis of Dinosaur Skulls Shows Three ‘Species’ Are Actually One
August 11th, 2013 Riffin A new analysis of dinosaur fossils by University of Pennsylvania researchers has revealed that a number of specimens of the genus Psittacosaurus — once believed to represent three different species — are all members of a single species. The differences among the fossil remains that led other scientists to label them as separate species in […]
International research team discovers new mineral
August 10th, 2013 Riffin Geologists at the University of California, Riverside have discovered a new mineral, cubic boron nitride, which they have named “qingsongite.” The discovery, made in 2009, was officially approved this week by the International Mineralogical Association. The UC Riverside geologists, Larissa Dobrzhinetskaya and Harry Green in the Department of Earth Sciences, were joined by […]
Earthquake data Visualisation
August 9th, 2013 Riffin ROLLA, Mo. – Making sense of the ever-increasing mounds of data is one of the great challenges facing researchers today. At Missouri University of Science and Technology, staff and students in the information technology department have come up with an approach to help researchers gain a new perspective on their data. The IT research support […]
