Clipmarks | Palaeontology Clips

Bird the size of plane found near London

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 09:22:49 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Probably was shot down during the Battle for Britain

Scientists have revealed the existence of a huge bird with bony teeth and wings spanning five metres, that once swooped over the wetlands of southern England 50 million years ago.

The creature was discovered in clay, east of London.

Dr Gerald Mayr, writing in the journal Palaeontology, says the bird is about the size of a small plane.

Tags: archaeology

Dinosaur fossil fetish spurs collectors' market

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 11:34:38 GMT

clipped by: boozich
clipper's remarks: the bad news: those who can't afford to keep up with escalating prices are losing out. This includes Britain's museums, whose budgets are pitiful compared to your average Hollywood hotshot or shipping magnate in pursuit of his next palaeontology fix.

Clip Source: www.independent.co.uk

Forget fine wines and fast cars – today's millionaires prefer collecting dinosaur skeletons. But are they pricing museums out of the market?

dinosaur skeleton

proving a hit with the rich and famous, always searching for something new to jazz up the country pile or Beverly Hills mansion.

Moneyed collectors are flocking to fossil auctions like never before. Just look at the catalogues of major auction houses over the past six months. In April, a 65-million-year-old Triceratops skeleton went under the hammer in Paris, and sold for a cool £400,000. In March, a prehistoric Siberian mammoth fetched an equally jaw-dropping £200,000 in New York

Among those with a dino fetish are the actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicholas Cage, who locked horns in a bidding war to obtain the head of a Tyrannosaurus bataar

says its client lists include a raft of Hollywood A-listers

dinosaur bones are sound business investments

price of a Triceratops skull in good condition has increased tenfold over the past decade

Parrot Fossil 55 Million Years Old Discovered In Scandinavia

Sun, 18 May 2008 15:50:26 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Palaeontologists have discovered fossil remains in Scandinavia of parrots dating back 55 million years. Reported May 14 in the journal Palaeontology, the fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark.

Parrots today live only in the tropics and southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the North, much earlier than had been thought.

The fossil parrot was discovered on the Isle of Mors in the northwest of Denmark – far from where you’d normally expect to find a parrot. It’s a new species, officially named 'Mopsitta tanta'. However, already its nick-name is the ‘Danish Blue Parrot’, a term derived from a famous comedy sketch about a 'Norwegian Blue Parrot' in the 1970s BBC television programme ‘Monty Python’.

At around 55 million years old, this is very much an ex-parrot. Indeed, Mopsitta represents the oldest and most northerly convincing remains of a parrot ever to have been discovered.

Tags: parrot, evolution

Ancient snake with two legs

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 14:06:23 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

What was lost tens of millions of years ago is now found.

A fossil animal locked in Lebanese limestone has been shown to be an extremely precious discovery - a snake with two legs.

Scientists have only a handful of specimens that illustrate the evolutionary narrative that goes from ancient lizard to limbless modern serpent.

Researchers at the European Light Source (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, used intense X-rays to confirm that a creature imprinted on a rock, and with one visible leg, had another appendage buried just under the surface of the slab.

"We were sure he had two legs but it was great to see it, and we hope to find other characteristics that we couldn't see on the other limb," said Alexandra Houssaye from the National Museum of Natural History, Paris.

The 85cm-long (33in) creature, known as Eupodophis descouensi, comes from the Late Cretaceous, about 92 million years ago.

Unearthed near the village of al-Nammoura, it was originally described in 2000.

Tags: palaeontology, fossils, biology, reptiles, snakes, science

Mummified Dino Uncovered - Skin and All

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:29:36 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Sounds fantastic...

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

"This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota.

Tags: dinosaurs, fossils, mummy, palaeontology, science

Dinosaurs roamed Washington DC

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:36:45 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Not now, just 100 million years ago... Or they're still there, er, in a kinda 'disguise'?

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Feb. 26, 2008 -- Until recently, evidence for dinosaurs in the northeastern United States was sparse, but over 900 theropod, sauropod, ankylosaur and ornithopod fossilized footprints have now been found just a short drive from the nation's capital, according to new studies.

The finds, which also include tracks for pterosaurs, a dino-era mammal and other vertebrates, suggest that Maryland was a hotbed for dinosaurs during the Cretaceous from around 98 to 121 million years ago.

Tags: dinosaurs, palaeontology, washington, maryland, prehistory, united states

Large dinosaur footprints found in Australia

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 14:34:09 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Large, carnivorous dinosaurs roamed southern Australia 115 million years ago, when the continent was joined to the Antarctica, and were padded with body fat to survive temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius.

Standing about 12-feet tall, these hardy creatures inhabited the area close to the South Pole for at least 10 million years during the Cretaceous period, an expert said.

Palaeontologists from Australia and the United States came by their findings after uncovering three separate fossil footprints measuring about 14 inches long, each with at least two or three partial toes.

The footprints were found close to the shoreline in Victoria, Australia, in February 2006 and February 2007.

"(They are) the biggest carnivores we have from polar southeastern Australia ... in other words (large) dinosaurs could live in these unusual environments," said Thomas Rich, curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Museum of Victoria.

Tags: dinosaurs, palaeontology, australia, science

Meet Big Daddy, the gigantic dinosaur just discovered in Argentina

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 13:06:32 GMT

clipped by: michellezm

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Scientists have unearthed the skeleton of what is believed to be a new dinosaur species, which at 105 feet long and 43 feet high is one of the biggest beasts of its time.

The fossilised remains of futalognkosaurus dukei, a giant plant-eater that would have lived about 80 million years ago, has been uncovered in Argentina, scientists said.

Argentine and Brazilian palaeontologists have been extracting fossils from the site on the southernmost tip of South America since 2000 and this latest fossil appears to be of a previously unknown species because of the unique structure of its neck.

Its name ( pronounced foo-ta-long-koh-sohr-us) derives from the Mapuche Indian words for "giant chief of the lizards".

Jorge Calvo, director of the palaeontology centre at the National University of Comahue, Argentina, said: "This is one of the biggest [dinosaurs] in the world and one of the most complete of these giants that exist."

Slipped disc: A vertebra from the back of the 105ft long creature

Tags: dinosaur, fossils, paleontology

Prehistoric seas

Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:35:00 GMT

clipped by: farrider

Clip Source: post.baidu.com

Tags: science, palaeontology

Rain Forest Fossils Probed in Illinois

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 16:51:00 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: dsc.discovery.com

Standing on the wind-swept flatlands of southern Vermilion County, you might think you'd have to drive the 180 miles to Chicago's Field Museum to find the nearest fossilized tree trunk from the Pennsylvania Age, 300 million years ago. Nah, just drill straight down.

That's where coal miners working south and west of Georgetown have unearthed, chunk by fossilized chunk, what has revealed itself over the past few years to be the remains of a fossilized rain forest.

It covers about 15 square miles, all more than 200 feet below ground, and probably is the largest intact rain forest from that period ever studied, according to Scott Elrick of the Illinois State Geological Survey.

It's that scale that makes what lies just above the Riola and Vermilion Grove mines significant, he said.

"We never encountered one whole forest preserved in one shot like this," Elrick said Monday. "The fossils just didn't stop."

Tags: archaeology, palaeontology, illinois, rain forest, fossils

Big Bird That Kermit Wouldn't Like

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 05:55:44 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Fossil Found of a Big Bird That Kermit Wouldn’t Like

Fossils of the largest known bird, an extinct flightless predator with a skull the size of a horse’s and a menacing beak like an eagle’s, have been discovered in Argentina, paleontologists reported last week.

The big bird, which stood about 10 feet tall and probably weighed 400 pounds, was fleet of foot and able to chase down and devour rodents, reptiles and small mammals 15 million years ago on the plains of Patagonia. Not for nothing are its closely related species, a group known as phorusrhacids, more commonly called the “terror birds.”

Tags: fossiles, palaeontology, giant birds, science

Australian chance to get a piece of (pre)history

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:03:19 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Maybe Adam would think about getting one of those pine trees and plant it in the backyard of Clipmarks HQ.

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Australian chance to get a piece of (pre)history

SYDNEY (AFP) - A dinosaur-era tree long believed extinct has gone on sale in Australia, giving any gardener the chance to plant some prehistory for under 45 US dollars.

A park ranger discovered a small stand of Wollemi Pines in mountains outside Sydney in 1994, stunning botanists since the trees were virtually unchanged since the Jurassic period 200 million years ago.

Last October collectors paid thousands of dollars for cuttings of selected Wollemi Pines at a special auction which marked the official "coming out" of the trees, believed to have been extinct for at least two million years.

Now everyday gardeners can purchase a 40 centimeter (16 inch) sapling of the Wollemi -- known as the "living fossil' -- for 60 Australian dollars (42 US) or a 60 cm plant for 100 dollars from nurseries around Australia or online at www.wollemipine.com.

Licences to plant the pine have also been granted in Britain, Europe, Japan and New Zealand.

Royalties will be used to fund the conservation of the trees -- currently only 100 adult Wollemi Pines are known to exist in the wild -- and of other rare and threatened plant species, organisers said.

Tags: wollemi pine, australia, palaeontology, botanics

Dan Dediu, on evolution, linguistics, etc.

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 14:40:26 GMT

clipped by: Djiezes
clipper's remarks: a few publications by Dan Dediu, whose main research interests

revolve around biology (especially evolutionary theory and genetics), human evolution (palaeontology and genetics) and linguistics (historical linguistics, linguistic diversity and language evolution). Being a keen fan of C++, I am interested in applying computational modeling techniques almost everywhere

source page is heavily linked ... could be an interesting resource.

Clip Source: www.ling.ed.ac.uk

Dan Dediu

Outputs

Mostly Out of Africa, but what did the others have to say?, published in the proceedings of the 6^th International Conference on Language Evolution (EvoLang6), Rome, Italy, 12-15 April 2006 [Cangelosi A., Smith, A.D.M. & Smith, K. (Eds.), 2006, The Evolution of Language, World Scientific, pp. 59-66] represents a very short review of the evidence failing to support the Recent Out of Africa with replacement (ROA) model of human evolution and its consequences for language evolution. This evidence comes from palaeoanthropology, genetics (human population genetics and ancient DNA studies), archaeology and primatology and can be broadly divided into two types: the evidence usually taken to support ROA against its competitors (for example, studies of Neandertal aDNA) and the evidence which seems to contradict the predictions of ROA, thus potentially falsifying it (e.g., the ancient rooting of some X chromosome markers in Asia as opposed to Africa). The paper (as published) is here, and the actual presentation here.

Trust in Language Evolution: this paper studies the problem of evolutionary stability of hard-to-verify communication to invasion by liars both computationally and mathematically (evolutionary game theory) and proposes three mechanisms facilitating this: social marking, involuntary signaling and memory of past interactions. The PDF file is here and the figures are: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Evolution of Syntax: Memes-Genes coevolution in the Multiregional Context: this is my Master's Degree in Neurobiology and Behavior thesis and approaches the interplay between language evolution and human evolutionary models both theoretically and through computer models. The main computer model simulates the human expansion over the Old World under a multiregional model of human evolution and the local coevolution between language and genes through a form of Baldwin effect, under certain conditions. The PDF file is here.

Tags: dan dediu, dediu, language, evolution, resource, literature, links, list, science, knowledge, biology, genetics, linguistics, simulation, technology, communication

riesenvieh (vogel)

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 23:01:34 GMT

clipped by: tomasio

Clip Source: derstandard.at

London - US-Forscher haben in Argentinien den größten bisher bekannten Vogelkopf ausgegraben. Der fossile Schädel ist mit 71,6 Zentimetern so lang wie ein Pferdekopf und gehörte einem so genannten Terrorvogel. Das berichten Luis Chiappe und Sara Bertelli vom Naturhistorischen Museum Los Angeles im britischen Fachjournal "Nature". Etwa die Hälfte der Länge nimmt ein adlerähnlicher Schnabel ein. Das Fossil stammt aus dem mittleren Miozän und ist etwa 14 Millionen Jahre alt.

Um zehn Prozent größer als bisher bekannte Vertreter

Cow-like dinosaur sucked up plants

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 04:03:25 GMT

clipped by: pokkets
clipper's remarks: They found the 'backup teeth, by CT (Computed Tomography) Scan of the skull. The dinosaur's posture was determined, by studying the canals of it's brain's balancing organs. They also say that the vertebrae were paper thin, and while it was difficult to imagine them coping with stresses of every day use, they have the 'grinning face' of the specimen to prove it was possible.

Clip Source: www.abc.net.au

Palaeontologists have unveiled a 110-million-year old African dinosaur with a mouth that sucked up plants like a vacuum cleaner and had almost translucent skull bones.

Details of the fossilised sauropod dinosaur found in Niger, dubbed Nigersaurus taqueti, are published today in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE.

Professor Paul Sereno from the the University of Chicago, who led the effort, says he named the creature 'taqueti' in honour of French palaeontologist Professor Philippe Taquet.

Sereno's colleague Didier Dutheil spied the Nigersaurus skull bones in 1997

Interestingly, Nigersaurus was able to sustain an elephant-sized body with an ultra-light head, says Sereno

the animal, which was hard pressed to lift its head above its back, grazed in a way that might suggest a Mesozoic cow rather than a reptilian giraffe

"Among dinosaurs, the Nigersaurus sets the Guinness record for tooth replacement,"

another curious anatomical feature was its backbone, made of more air then bone

Tags: dinosaur, nigersaurus taqueti, palaeontology, fossil, teeth