A French-Kenyan research team has just described a new fossil ancestor of today’s hippo family. This discovery bridges a gap in the fossil record separating these animals from their closest modern-day cousins, the cetaceans. It also shows that some 35 million years ago, the ancestors of hippos were among the first large mammals to colonize […]
Archive for February, 2015
Kenyan fossils show evolution of hippos
February 26th, 2015 
Riffin 
Posted in Featured Post 
Tags: evolution of hippos, Kenyan fossils, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society 
No Comments »Were dinosaurs destined to be big? Testing Cope’s rule
February 24th, 2015 Riffin In the evolutionary long run, small critters tend to evolve into bigger beasts — at least according to the idea attributed to paleontologist Edward Cope, now known as Cope’s Rule. Using the latest advanced statistical modeling methods, a new test of this rule as it applies dinosaurs shows that Cope was right — sometimes. “For […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Cope's rule, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Eonatator coellensis: New marine fossil from Columbia
February 20th, 2015 Riffin A nearly complete fossil of a prehistoric marine reptile with preserved soft tissue has been found in central-western Colombia, at a spot several hundred miles from the Caribbean coast, a university in this capital said. Experts have given the reptile the name “Eonatator coellensis” because the find was made in a dry stream bed in […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Eonatator coellensis, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Life Possible On Earth 3.2 Billion Years Ago
February 17th, 2015 Riffin A spark from a lightning bolt, interstellar dust, or a subsea volcano could have triggered the very first life on Earth. But what happened next? Life can exist without oxygen, but without plentiful nitrogen to build genes — essential to viruses, bacteria and all other organisms — life on the early Earth would have been […]
Docofossor,Agilodocodon : mammal fossils discovered
February 15th, 2015 Riffin The fossils of two interrelated ancestral mammals, newly discovered in China, suggest that the wide-ranging ecological diversity of modern mammals had a precedent more than 160 million years ago. With claws for climbing and teeth adapted for a tree sap diet, Agilodocodon scansorius is the earliest-known tree-dwelling mammaliaform (long-extinct relatives of modern mammals). The other […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Agilodocodon, Docofossor, mammal fossils, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Swimming reptiles make their mark in the Early Triassic
February 14th, 2015 Riffin Vertebrate tracks provide valuable information about animal behavior and environments. Swim tracks are a unique type of vertebrate track because they are produced underwater by buoyant trackmakers, and specific factors are required for their production and subsequent preservation. Early Triassic deposits contain the highest number of fossil swim track occurrences worldwide compared to other epochs, […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Early Triassic, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, Swimming reptiles, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »15-million-year-old mollusk protein found
February 6th, 2015 Riffin A team of Carnegie scientists have found “beautifully preserved” 15 million-year-old thin protein sheets in fossil shells from southern Maryland. Their findings are published in the inaugural issue of Geochemical Perspectives Letters. The team–John Nance, John Armstrong, George Cody, Marilyn Fogel, and Robert Hazen–collected samples from Calvert Cliffs, along the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay, […]
NOW Explains Earth’s magnetic field
February 1st, 2015 Riffin Earth’s magnetic field is crucial for our existence, as it shields the life on our planet’s surface from deadly cosmic rays. It is generated by turbulent motions of liquid iron in Earth’s core. Iron is a metal, which means it can easily conduct a flow of electrons that makes up an electric current. New findings […]
