A team of international researchers, led by Monash University’s Associate Professor Wouter Schellart, have developed a new global map of subduction zones, illustrating which ones are predicted to be capable of generating giant earthquakes and which ones are not. The new research, published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, comes nine […]
Archive for December, 2013
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Fossil Worm Burrows Reveal Very Early Terrestrial Animal Activity and Shed Light on Trophic Resources after the End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction
December 28th, 2013 
Riffin The widespread mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous caused world-wide disruption of ecosystems, and faunal responses to the one-two punch of severe environmental perturbation and ecosystem collapse are still unclear. Here we report the discovery of in situ terrestrial fossil burrows from just above the impact-defined Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary in southwestern North Dakota. […]
Oldest big cat fossil found in Tibet
December 26th, 2013 Riffin The oldest big cat fossils ever found – from a previously unknown species “similar to a snow leopard” – have been unearthed in the Himalayas.The skull fragments of the newly-named Panthera blytheae have been dated between 4.1 and 5.95 million years old. Their discovery in Tibet supports the theory that big cats evolved in central […]
Mapping the Demise of the Dinosaurs
December 24th, 2013 Riffin About 65 million years ago, an asteroid or comet crashed into a shallow sea near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The resulting firestorm and global dust cloud caused the extinction of many land plants and large animals, including most of the dinosaurs. At this week’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) […]
Multivariate Analyses of Small Theropod Dinosaur Teeth and Implications for Paleoecological Turnover through Time
December 23rd, 2013 Riffin Isolated small theropod teeth are abundant in vertebrate microfossil assemblages, and are frequently used in studies of species diversity in ancient ecosystems. However, determining the taxonomic affinities of these teeth is problematic due to an absence of associated diagnostic skeletal material. Species such as Dromaeosaurus albertensis, Richardoestesia gilmorei, and Saurornitholestes langstoni are known from skeletal […]
Tyrant Dinosaur Evolution Tracks the Rise and Fall of Late Cretaceous Oceans
December 22nd, 2013 Riffin The Late Cretaceous (~95–66 million years ago) western North American landmass of Laramidia displayed heightened non-marine vertebrate diversity and intracontinental regionalism relative to other latest Cretaceous Laurasian ecosystems. Processes generating these patterns during this interval remain poorly understood despite their presumed role in the diversification of many clades. Tyrannosauridae, a clade of large-bodied theropod dinosaurs […]
Human Evolution Gap filled by 1.4 Million-Year-Old Fossil Human Hand Bone
December 21st, 2013 Riffin Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows them to make and use tools. Apes and other nonhuman primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team […]
The Mystery of Lizard Breath: One-Way Air Flow May Be 270 Million Years Old
December 17th, 2013 Riffin Air flows mostly in a one-way loop through the lungs of monitor lizards — a breathing method shared by birds, alligators and presumably dinosaurs, according to a new University of Utah study. The findings — published online Dec. 11 in the journal Nature — raise the possibility this breathing pattern originated 270 million years ago, […]
Location of Upwelling in Earth’s Mantle Discovered to Be Stable
December 16th, 2013 Riffin A study published in Nature today shares the discovery that large-scale upwelling within Earth’s mantle mostly occurs in only two places: beneath Africa and the Central Pacific. More importantly, Clinton Conrad, Associate Professor of Geology at the University of Hawaii — Manoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) and colleagues revealed that […]
Edmontosaurus:Dinosaur Fossil With Fleshy Rooster’s Comb Is First of Its Kind
December 15th, 2013 Riffin The structure above the fossil’s head was so unexpected that Phil Bell put his chisel straight through the middle of it. “I was just expecting there to be rock, and all of a sudden there was skin underneath, and I thought to myself, ‘Whoops,’” he said. What Bell had found was the first dinosaur fossil […]
