Posts Tagged ‘WFS’

WFS News: 540m-year-old bug tracks discovered

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev The oldest known footprints on Earth, left by an ancient creepy-crawly more than 500 million years ago, have been discovered in China. The tracks were left by a primitive ancestor of modern-day insects or worms, according to scientists. Precisely what the creature looked like is a mystery, though: […]

WFS News: Articulated remains of the extinct shark Ptychodus (Elasmobranchii, Ptychodontidae) from the Upper Cretaceous of Spain

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev In 1996, palaeontologists found skeletal remains of a giant shark at the northern coast of Spain, near the city Santander. Here, the coast comprises meter high limestone walls that were deposited during the Cretaceous period, around 85 million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the world. Scientists from […]

WFS News: New Dinosaur Elaphrosaur Unearthed in Australia

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev The newly-discovered dinosaur belongs to Elaphrosaurinae, an enigmatic group of gracile ceratosaurian dinosaurs known from the Late Jurassic period of Africa and Asia, and the early Late Cretaceous period of Argentina. “Elaphrosaurs were strange looking dinosaurs — they ran low to the ground on two legs, with a slender […]

WFS News: Cassowary gloss and a novel form of structural color in birds

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Cassowaries are big flightless birds with blue heads and dinosaur-looking feet; they look like emus that time forgot, and they’re objectively terrifying. They’re also, along with their ostrich and kiwi cousins, part of the bird family that split off from chickens, ducks, and songbirds 100 million years ago. […]

WFS News: Skeleton of a Cretaceous mammal from Madagascar reflects long-term insularity

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev In evolutionary terms, islands are the stuff of weirdness. It is on islands where animals evolve in isolation, often for millions of years, with different food sources, competitors, predators, and parasites…indeed, different everything compared to mainland species. As a result, they develop into different shapes and sizes and […]

WFS News: 200-million-year-old ‘squid’ attack revealed

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest known example of a squid-like creature attacking its prey, in a fossil dating back almost 200 million years. The fossil was found on the Jurassic coast of southern England in the 19th century and is currently housed within the collections of the […]

WFS News: Scientists have reconstructed the skulls of some of the world’s oldest known dinosaur embryos in 3D, using synchrotron techniques.

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev An international team of scientists led by the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, has been able to reconstruct, in the smallest details, the skulls of some of the world’s oldest known dinosaur embryos in 3D, using powerful and non-destructive synchrotron techniques at the ESRF, the European […]

WFS News: ‘Dineobellator notohesperus’ ,dinosaur with nasty gouge mark on claw

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev About 70 million years ago, a cousin of Velociraptor got in a brawl with a larger predator that left it with a nasty rib injury. But this dinosaur, a feathered hypercarnivore, lived to tell the tale, as its rib showed signs of healing, a new study finds. The newfound species, dubbed Dineobellator […]

WFS News: Iridescent Bones of a Lost Dinosaur Herd Discovered in an Opal Mine

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Gemstones are precious, especially when they come filled with dinosaur bones. Back in the 1980s, a miner unearthed a slew of fossils preserved in opals in an opal mine near Lightning Ridge in Australia. A recent analysis of those opalized fossils revealed that they held the remains of […]

WFS News: Discovery of the oldest bilaterian from the Ediacaran of South Australia

@WFS,World Fossil Society,Riffin T Sajeev,Russel T Sajeev Discovery of the oldest bilaterian from the Ediacaran of South Australia   A team led by UC Riverside geologists has discovered the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most familiar animals today, including humans. The tiny, wormlike creature, named Ikaria wariootia, is the earliest bilaterian, or organism […]