In the history of continental drift, India has been a mysterious record-holder. More than 140 million years ago, India was part of an immense supercontinent called Gondwana, which covered much of the Southern Hemisphere. Around 120 million years ago, what is now India broke off and started slowly migrating north, at about 5 centimeters per […]
Posts Tagged ‘Russel T Sajeev’
Chicken Embryos With Dino Snouts ?
May 15th, 2015 
Riffin Chicks with dino-snouts? With a little molecular tinkering, for the first time scientists have created chicken embryos with broad, Velociraptor-like muzzles in the place of their beaks. The bizarrely developing chickens shed new light on how the bird beak evolved, scientists added. The Age of Dinosaurs came to an end with a bang about 65 […]
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Tags: Chicken Embryos, Dino Snouts ?, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society 
No Comments »Can skull shape and function determine what kind of food was on prehistoric plates?
May 12th, 2015 Riffin When paleontologists put together a life history for a long-extinct animal, it’s common to infer the foods it ate by looking at modern animals with similar skull shapes and tooth patterns. But this practice is far from foolproof. New modeling and tests based on living species done at the American Museum of Natural History show […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, Skull shape, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Explosive volcanoes fueled by water
May 9th, 2015 Riffin University of Oregon geologists have tapped water in surface rocks to show how magma forms deep underground and produces explosive volcanoes in the Cascade Range. “Water is a key player,” says Paul J. Wallace, a professor in the UO’s Department of Geological Sciences and coauthor of a paper in the May issue of Nature Geoscience. […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Explosive volcanoes, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »Archaeornithura meemannae : a new bird fossil
May 6th, 2015 Riffin Scientists in China have described a new species of early bird, from two fossils with intact plumage dating to 130 million years ago. Based on the age of the surrounding rocks, this is the earliest known member of the clade that produced today’s birds: Ornithuromorpha.It pushes back the branching-out of this evolutionary group by at […]
Rupture along the Himalayan Front
May 4th, 2015 Riffin In their article for Lithosphere on 12 March, authors Kristin Morell and colleagues write, “The ∼700-km-long ‘central seismic gap’ is the most prominent segment of the Himalayan front not to have ruptured in a major earthquake during the last 200-500 years. This prolonged seismic quiescence has led to the proposition that this region, with a […]
WFS: Ariyalur Fossils ( Arctostrea )
May 2nd, 2015 Riffin WFS: Ariyalur Fossils ( Arctostrea ): This upper Cretaceous oyster is characterized by long and curved valves. Stout ribs cross the upper valve. The sample is obtained from Ariyalur/Dalmiapuram area. samples collected by Riffin T Sajeev and Russel T Sajeev from World Fossil society. The Rastellum genus of oysters lived between 161 to 65 million […]
Brachiopod shell shows sign of evolution
May 1st, 2015 Riffin Researchers of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have carried out the first detailed study of the molecular mechanisms responsible for formation of the brachiopod shell. Comparison with shell synthesis in other groups reveals the deep evolutionary roots of the process. Brachiopods (lamp shells) are marine invertebrates, which were a highly successful and widespread group in the […]
Posted in Featured Post Tags: Brachiopod shell, Riffin T Sajeev, Russel T Sajeev, sign of evolution, WFS, world fossil society No Comments »WFS: Dinosaur Diary: AVIMIMUS
April 29th, 2015 Riffin Name Means: “Bird mimic” Length: 5 feet (1.5 m) Pronounced: AYV-ee-MIME-us Weight: 45 pounds (20 kilos) When it lived: Late Cretaceous – 95 MYA Where found: Mongolia, China Avimimus was discovered by Russian paleontologist Sergei Mikhailovich Kurzanov during the exploration of the Joint Soviet-Mongolian paleontological expedition in the summer of 1973, at the Udan-Sayr […]
‘platypus’ dinosaur: Vegetarian relative of T. rex
April 28th, 2015 Riffin Although closely related to the notorious carnivore Tyrannosaurus rex, a new lineage of dinosaur discovered in Chile is proving to be an evolutionary jigsaw puzzle, as it preferred to graze upon plants. Palaeontologists are referring to Chilesaurus diegosuarezi as a ‘platypus’ dinosaur because of its bizarre combination of characters that resemble different dinosaur groups. For […]
