Today in Australia they call it Kauri, in Asia they call it Dammar, and in South America it does not exist at all unless planted there. But 52 million years ago the giant coniferous evergreen tree known to botanists as Agathis thrived in the Patagonian region of Argentina, according to an international team of paleobotanists, […]
Posts Tagged ‘Russel T Sajeev’
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Amber Fossil Reveals Ancient Reproduction in Flowering Plants
January 7th, 2014 
Riffin A 100-million-year old piece of amber has been discovered which reveals the oldest evidence of sexual reproduction in a flowering plant — a cluster of 18 tiny flowers from the Cretaceous Period — with one of them in the process of making some new seeds for the next generation. The perfectly-preserved scene, in a plant […]
‘Nedoceratops’: An Example of a Transitional Morphology
January 4th, 2014 Riffin The holotype and only specimen of the chasmosaurine ceratopsid dinosaur ‘Nedoceratops hatcheri’ has been the source of considerable taxonomic debate since its initial description. At times it has been referred to its own genus while at others it has been considered synonymous with the contemporaneous chasmosaurine Triceratops. Most recently, the debate has focused on whether […]
Global Map Predicts Locations for Giant Earthquakes
December 31st, 2013 Riffin A team of international researchers, led by Monash University’s Associate Professor Wouter Schellart, have developed a new global map of subduction zones, illustrating which ones are predicted to be capable of generating giant earthquakes and which ones are not. The new research, published in the journal Physics of the Earth and Planetary Interiors, comes nine […]
Fossil Worm Burrows Reveal Very Early Terrestrial Animal Activity and Shed Light on Trophic Resources after the End-Cretaceous Mass Extinction
December 28th, 2013 Riffin The widespread mass extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous caused world-wide disruption of ecosystems, and faunal responses to the one-two punch of severe environmental perturbation and ecosystem collapse are still unclear. Here we report the discovery of in situ terrestrial fossil burrows from just above the impact-defined Cretaceous-Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary in southwestern North Dakota. […]
Oldest big cat fossil found in Tibet
December 26th, 2013 Riffin The oldest big cat fossils ever found – from a previously unknown species “similar to a snow leopard” – have been unearthed in the Himalayas.The skull fragments of the newly-named Panthera blytheae have been dated between 4.1 and 5.95 million years old. Their discovery in Tibet supports the theory that big cats evolved in central […]
Mapping the Demise of the Dinosaurs
December 24th, 2013 Riffin About 65 million years ago, an asteroid or comet crashed into a shallow sea near what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico. The resulting firestorm and global dust cloud caused the extinction of many land plants and large animals, including most of the dinosaurs. At this week’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) […]
Multivariate Analyses of Small Theropod Dinosaur Teeth and Implications for Paleoecological Turnover through Time
December 23rd, 2013 Riffin Isolated small theropod teeth are abundant in vertebrate microfossil assemblages, and are frequently used in studies of species diversity in ancient ecosystems. However, determining the taxonomic affinities of these teeth is problematic due to an absence of associated diagnostic skeletal material. Species such as Dromaeosaurus albertensis, Richardoestesia gilmorei, and Saurornitholestes langstoni are known from skeletal […]
Tyrant Dinosaur Evolution Tracks the Rise and Fall of Late Cretaceous Oceans
December 22nd, 2013 Riffin The Late Cretaceous (~95–66 million years ago) western North American landmass of Laramidia displayed heightened non-marine vertebrate diversity and intracontinental regionalism relative to other latest Cretaceous Laurasian ecosystems. Processes generating these patterns during this interval remain poorly understood despite their presumed role in the diversification of many clades. Tyrannosauridae, a clade of large-bodied theropod dinosaurs […]
Human Evolution Gap filled by 1.4 Million-Year-Old Fossil Human Hand Bone
December 21st, 2013 Riffin Humans have a distinctive hand anatomy that allows them to make and use tools. Apes and other nonhuman primates do not have these distinctive anatomical features in their hands, and the point in time at which these features first appeared in human evolution is unknown. Now, a University of Missouri researcher and her international team […]
