Everyone is excited by discoveries of new dinosaurs – or indeed any new fossil species. But a key question for palaeontologists is ‘just how good is the fossil record?’ Do we know fifty per cent of the species of dinosaurs that ever existed, or ninety per cent or even less than one per cent? And […]
Archive for August, 2015
just how good is the fossil record?
August 31st, 2015 
Riffin 
Posted in Featured Post 
Tags: Fossil record, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society 
No Comments »Pigments in fossil feathers
August 29th, 2015 Riffin A study provides multiple lines of new evidence that pigments and the microbodies that produce them can remain evident in a dinosaur fossil. In the journal Scientific Reports, an international team of paleontologists correlates the distinct chemical signature of animal pigment with physical evidence of melanosome organelles in the fossilized feathers of Anchiornis huxleyi, a […]
Gueragama sulamericana: Lizard Fossil
August 27th, 2015 Riffin University of Alberta paleontologists have discovered a new species of lizard, named Gueragama sulamericana, in the municipality of Cruzeiro do Oeste in Southern Brazil in the rock outcrops of a Late Cretaceous desert, dated approximately 80 million years ago. “The roughly 1700 species of iguanas are almost without exception restricted to the New World, primarily […]
Malformed fossil plankton
August 26th, 2015 Riffin Several Palaeozoic mass extinction events during the Ordovician and Silurian periods (ca. 485 to 420 to million years ago) shaped the evolution of life on our planet. Although some of these short-lived, periodic events were responsible for eradication of up to 85% of marine species, the exact kill-mechanism responsible for these crises remains poorly understood. […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Malformed fossil plankton, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »microtomography : A new tool in Paleontology
August 25th, 2015 Riffin Researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have used computed microtomography (micro-CT) to identify to the species level an exceptionally wellpreserved fossil arthropod from the famous Chengjiang Lagerstätte in China. Modern imaging methods make it possible to perform detailed, non-invasive studies on the internal structures of irreplaceable fossil specimens. Researchers led by Dr. Yu Liu of […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: microtomography, Paleontology, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Meteorite impacts can create DNA building blocks
August 21st, 2015 Riffin A new study shown that meteorite impacts on ancient oceans may have created nucleobases and amino acids. Researchers from Tohoku University, National Institute for Materials Science and Hiroshima University discovered this after conducting impact experiments simulating a meteorite hitting an ancient ocean. With precise analysis of the products recovered after impacts, the team found the […]
Montsechia, first aquatic angiosperm ?
August 18th, 2015 Riffin Indiana University paleobotanist David Dilcher and colleagues in Europe have identified a 125 million- to 130 million-year-old freshwater plant as one of earliest flowering plants on Earth. The finding, reported Aug. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents a major change in the presumed form of one of the planet’s earliest […]
How do continents break up?
August 16th, 2015 Riffin When the western part of the super-continent Gondwana broke up around 130 Million years ago, today’s Africa and South-America started to separate and the South Atlantic was born. It is commonly assumed that enormous masses of magma ascended from the deep mantle up to higher levels, and that this hot mantle plume (the Tristan mantle […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: continents break up, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Ichibengops : pre-mammal fossils from Zambia
August 14th, 2015 Riffin Scientists at The Field Museum have identified a new species of pre-mammal in what is now Zambia. Thanks to a unique groove on the animal’s upper jaw, it was dubbed Ichibengops (Itchy-BEN-gops), which combines the local Bemba word for scar (ichibenga), and the common Greek suffix for face (ops). Put simply: Scarface. Believed to be […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: fossils, Ichibengops, pre-mammal, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society, Zambia No Comments »Big dinosaur discoveries in tiny toothy packages
August 12th, 2015 Riffin Researchers have examined one of the smallest parts of the fossil record–theropod teeth–to shed light on the evolution of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. Findings published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica have effectively quadrupled the dinosaur diversity in the area of study, eight localities from Treviño County, Huesca and Lerida–including the exceptional […]
