Archive for the ‘Featured Post’ Category

WFS News: Pterosaurs: Fur flies over feathery fossils

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Two exceptionally well preserved fossils give a new picture of the pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Scientists believe the creatures may have had feathers, and looked something like brown bats with fuzzy wings. The surprise discovery suggests feathers evolved not in […]

WFS News: Antarctanax,an Iguana-sized dinosaur from Antarctica

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Antarctica wasn’t always a frozen wasteland — 250 million years ago, it was covered in forests and rivers, and the temperature rarely dipped below freezing. It was also home to diverse wildlife, including early relatives of the dinosaurs. Scientists have just discovered the newest member of that family […]

WFS News: Koreamegops samsiki,The ancient spider had eyes that shone in the dark

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev IF YOU COULD time-travel to Korea 110 million years ago, you’d see an eerie spectacle if you walked out at night with a flashlight: Each sweep of your beam would make the landscape sparkle as innumerable spider eyes glinted in the dark. In a new study in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology, […]

WFS News: What’s the World’s Largest Dinosaur?

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev The battle for the title of world’s largest dinosaur is complicated. Here’s why: Paleontologists rarely discover an entire skeleton. They’re more likely to uncover bone fragments and then try to estimate a profile of height and weight. Moreover, there are three categories for largest dinosaur on record: the […]

WFS News:The mysteries of a giant prehistoric marine reptile unlocked with the help of Medical scanner

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Descriptive anatomy of the largest known specimen of Protoichthyosaurus prostaxalis (Reptilia: Ichthyosauria) including computed tomography and digital reconstruction of a three-dimensional skull Ichthyosaurs were a highly successful group of predatory marine reptiles that appeared in the late Early Triassic and went extinct in the early Late Cretaceous (Fischer et al., […]

WFS News: Introduction to dating glacial sediments

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Many methods of dating glacial sediments As glacial geologists, some of the biggest questions that we’d like to answer are not only how large former ice sheets were, but also how fast did the recede and how quickly did they thin? This information is vital for numerical models, […]

Seismic analysis reveals huge amount of water dragged into Earth’s interior

Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench. The observations from the deepest ocean trench in the world have important implications for the global water cycle, according to researchers in […]

Massive impact crater from a kilometer-wide iron meteorite discovered in Greenland

An international team lead by researchers from the Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen have discovered a 31-km wide meteorite impact crater buried beneath the ice-sheet in the northern Greenland. This is the first time that a crater of any size has been found under one of Earth’s […]

Ancient DNA reveals history of extinct Caribbean monkey

Analysis of ancient DNA of a mysterious extinct monkey named Xenothrix — which displays bizarre body characteristics very different to any living monkey — has revealed that it was in fact most closely related to South America’s titi monkeys (Callicebinae). Having made their way overwater to Jamaica, probably on floating vegetation, their bones reveal they […]

Demise of Indus Valley civilization could have been a result of climate change.

More than 4,000 years ago, the Harappa culture thrived in the Indus River Valley of what is now modern Pakistan and northwestern India, where they built sophisticated cities, invented sewage systems that predated ancient Rome’s, and engaged in long-distance trade with settlements in Mesopotamia. Yet by 1800 BCE, this advanced culture had abandoned their cities, […]