Scientists at the University of Manchester have discovered what is believed to be the smallest fossil ever found. A 50-million-year-old parasite – hitching a ride on a not-much-bigger spider – was discovered during a scan of Baltic amber. Published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters, the find was made using a computed tomography (CT) scan, […]
Archive for March, 2014
world’s smallest fossil, is an ancient mite less than two tenths of a millimetre long
March 29th, 2014 
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Paleontologists assemble giant turtle bone from fossil discoveries made centuries apart
March 28th, 2014 Riffin “As soon as those two halves came together, like puzzle pieces, you knew it,” said Ted Daeschler, PhD, associate curator of vertebrate zoology and vice president for collections at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University. That surprising puzzle assembly occurred in the fall of 2012, when Jason Schein, assistant curator of natural history […]
Counting calories in the fossil record: How the biology of our modern ocean evolved
March 27th, 2014 Riffin Starting about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, brachiopod groups disappeared in large numbers, along with 90 percent of the planet’s species. Today, only a few groups, or genera, of brachiopods remain. “Most people won’t be familiar with brachiopods. They’re pretty rare in the modern ocean,” said Jonathan Payne, a […]
Computer models solve geologic riddle millions of years in the making
March 25th, 2014 Riffin An international team of scientists that included USC’s Meghan Miller used computer modeling to reveal, for the first time, how giant swirls form during the collision of tectonic plates — with subduction zones stuttering and recovering after continental fragments slam into them. The team’s 3D models suggest a likely answer to a question that has […]
Fern Fossil Contains Unique chromosomes
March 23rd, 2014 Riffin Researchers from Lund University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History have made a unique discovery in a well-preserved fern that lived 180 million years ago. Both undestroyed cell nuclei and individual chromosomes have been found in the plant fossil, thanks to its sudden burial in a volcanic eruption. The well-preserved fossil […]
After major earthquake, silence: Dynamic stressing of a global system of faults results in rare seismic silence
March 21st, 2014 Riffin In the global aftershock zone that followed the major April 2012 Indian Ocean earthquake, seismologists noticed an unusual pattern — a dynamic “stress shadow,” or period of seismic silence when some faults near failure were temporarily rendered incapable of a large rupture. The magnitude (M) 8.6 earthquake, a strike-slip event at intraoceanic tectonic plates, caused […]
Oldest fossil evidence of modern African venomous snakes found in Tanzania
March 20th, 2014 Riffin Ohio University scientists have found the oldest definitive fossil evidence of modern, venomous snakes in Africa, according to a new study published March 19 in the journal PLOS ONE. The newly discovered fossils demonstrate that elapid snakes — such as cobras, kraits and sea snakes — were present in Africa as early as 25 million […]
A Diminutive New Tyrannosaur from the Top of the World
March 19th, 2014 Riffin Tyrannosaurid theropods were dominant terrestrial predators in Asia and western North America during the last of the Cretaceous. The known diversity of the group has dramatically increased in recent years with new finds, but overall understanding of tyrannosaurid ecology and evolution is based almost entirely on fossils from latitudes at or below southern Canada and […]
‘Steak-knife’ teeth reveal ecology of oldest land predators
March 18th, 2014 Riffin The first top predators to walk on land were not afraid to bite off more than they could chew, a University of Toronto Mississauga study has found. Graduate student and lead author Kirstin Brink along with Professor Robert Reisz from U of T Mississauga’s Department of Biology suggest that Dimetrodon, a carnivore that walked on […]
Cotylocara macei: A New Fossil Species shows evidence of echolocation
March 16th, 2014 Riffin Research led by an anatomy professor at New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine indicates that echolocation — the sonar-like system based on high-frequency vocalizations and their echoes — was present in a 28-million-year old relative of modern-day toothed whales, dolphins, and porpoises. Associate Professor Jonathan Geisler led the study of a new […]
