Tag: Fossil

ScienceDaily (Jan. 28, 2011) University of Alberta researchers determined that a fossilized dinosaur bone found in New Mexico confounds the long established paradigm that the age of dinosaurs ended between 65.5 and 66 million years ago.

The U of A team, led by Larry Heaman from the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, determined the femur bone of a hadrosaur as being only 64.8 million years old. That means this particular plant eater was alive about 700,000 years after the mass extinction event many paleontologists believe wiped all non-avian dinosaurs off the face of earth, forever.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 12, 2010) In a world first an international team of researchers, led by Dr Michael Bunce of Murdoch University, have successfully isolated ancient DNA from fossil eggshell remains of extinct birds.

"We were really surprised to discover that ancient DNA is well-preserved in fossil eggshells, particularly the heaviest bird to have existed the elephant bird called Aepyornis, which is now extinct," said Murdoch doctoral student Charlotte Oskam, who undertook the research.

ScienceDaily (Mar. 1, 2010) A rare, ancient polar bear fossil discovered in Norway in 2004 is yielding a treasure trove of essential information about the age and evolutionary origins of the species whose future is now seen as synonymous with the devastation wrought by climate change.

A paper published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers at Penn State University, the University at Buffalo, the University of Oslo, and other institutions is filling in key pieces of the evolutionary history of polar bears and brown bears, including their response to past climate changes.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 23, 2009) More than a hundred years after its discovery, the limbs and vertebrae of a fossil have been pulled off the shelf at the American Museum of Natural History to revise the view of early carnivore lifestyles.
Carnivores -- currently a diverse group of mostly meat-eating mammals like bears, cats, raccoons, seals, and hyenas -- had been considered arboreal in their early evolutionary history.
But now that the skeleton of 'Miacis' uintensis has been unpacked from its matrix of sandstone, it is clear that some early carnivores were built to walk on the ground at least part of the time. The new research is published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.