What is the Mohorovičić Discontinuity? The Mohorovicic Discontinuity, or “Moho”, is the boundary between the crust and the mantle. The red line in the drawing below shows its location. In geology the word “discontinuity” is used for a surface at which seismic waves change velocity. One of these surfaces exists at an average depth of […]
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Mass Extinction Study Provides Lessons for Modern World
November 5th, 2012
Riffin The Cretaceous Period of Earth history ended with a mass extinction that wiped out numerous species, most famously the dinosaurs. A new study now finds that the structure of North American ecosystems made the extinction worse than it might have been. Researchers at the University of Chicago, the California Academy of Sciences and the Field […]
MOUNT ST HELENS
November 4th, 2012
riffin Mount St Helens is located in the Cascade mountain range in the state of Washington in the United States and is famous for its devastating 1980 eruption, which killed 57 people. Among the dead were a geologist and others who were monitoring thevolcano. The victims closest to the eruption were killed almost instantly when an earthquake triggered […]
Were Dinosaurs Destined to Be Big? Testing Cope’s Rule
November 3rd, 2012
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 […]
Exhaustive Family Tree for Birds Shows Recent, Rapid Diversification
November 1st, 2012
riffin A Yale-led scientific team has produced the most comprehensive family tree for birds to date, connecting all living bird species — nearly 10,000 in total — and revealing surprising new details about their evolutionary history and its geographic context. Analysis of the family tree shows when and where birds diversified — and that birds’ diversification […]
CT scans reveal that dinosaurs were airheads
October 31st, 2012
Riffin Paleontologists have long known that dinosaurs had tiny brains, but they had no idea the beasts were such airheads. A new study by Ohio University researchers Lawrence Witmer and Ryan Ridgely found that dinosaurs had more air cavities in their heads than expected. By using CT scans, the scientists were able to develop 3-D images […]
Huge Deposit of Jurassic Turtle Remains Found in China ?
October 30th, 2012
riffin “Bones upon bones, we couldn’t believe our eyes,” says Oliver Wings, paleontologist and guest researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin. He was describing the spectacular find of some 1800 fossilized mesa chelonia turtles from the Jurassic era in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang. Wings and the University of Tübingen’s fossil turtle specialist, Dr. […]
Why Do the Caribbean Islands Arc? Movement of Earth Modeled to 3,000 Km Depth
October 29th, 2012
Riffin The Caribbean islands have been pushed east over the last 50 million years, driven by the movement of Earth’s viscous mantle against the more rooted South American continent, reveals new research by geophysicists from USC. The results, published August 19 inNature Geoscience, give us a better understanding of how continents resist the constant movement of […]
Fossils of First Feathered Dinosaurs from North America Discovered: Clues On Early Wing Uses
October 28th, 2012
riffin The ostrich-like dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park movie were portrayed as a herd of scaly, fleet-footed animals being chased by a ferocious Tyrannosaurus rex. New research published in the journal Sciencereveals this depiction of these bird-mimic dinosaurs is not entirely accurate — the ornithomimids, as they are scientifically known, should have had feathers and wings. The […]
Ancient Protein Preservation from dinosaur bone
October 26th, 2012
Riffin A team of researchers from North Carolina State University and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has found more evidence for the preservation of ancient dinosaur proteins, including reactivity to antibodies that target specific proteins normally found in bone cells of vertebrates. These results further rule out sample contamination, and help solidify the case for […]



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