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

First dinosaur tracks found in Arabian Peninsula

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:11:48 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

Scientists have discovered the tracks of a herd of 11 long-necked sauropods walking along a coastal mudflat in what is now the Republic of Yemen, the first discovery of dinosaur footprints on the Arabian peninsula.

Sauropods, the largest land animals in earth's history, walked on four stout legs and ate plants.

"The nice thing is we finally filled in a bit of a blank spot in the dinosaur map," said Anne Schulp, a palaeontologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who worked on the study.

The creatures roamed the Earth from about 228 million years ago to 65 million years ago, the middle of the age of dinosaurs.

Paleontologists have so far unearthed only a few dinosaur fossils from the Arabian peninsula and possible fragments of a long-necked dinosaur from Yemen.

Tags: palaeontology, dinosaurs, yemen, arabia, science

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

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

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

Fossil of new dinosaur species found in China

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 16:41:49 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.yahoo.com

BEIJING (Reuters) - Scientists have found the fossil of a new herbivorous dinosaur species that stood five meters (5.5 yards) high and lived 60 million years ago, the official Xinhua agency reported on Thursday.

The large long-necked sauropod, which was found in Eastern Zhejiang province and has not yet been named, was around 15 meters long, the report quoted a museum curator as saying.

In 1977, a 22-meter-long dinosaur was unearthed in the same province, and last year scientists announced they had identified another fossil found there as a new species.

China makes regular finds of rare fossils, which are sometimes smuggled out of the country to be sold for large sums.

Tags: dinosaurs, palaeontology, fossils, china, science

Academic uncovers Holy Grail of palaeontology

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:39:12 GMT

clipped by: dewitte

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Palaeontologist Dr Phil Manning, working with National Geographic Channel has uncovered the Holy Grail of palaeontology in the United States: a partially intact dino mummy.

Named Dakota, this 67-million-year-old dinosaur is one of the most important dinosaur discoveries in recent times - calling into question our conception of dinosaurs' body shape, skin preservation and movement.

The find is documented in the UK premiere of Dino Autopsy on Sunday 9 December at 9pm on National Geographic Channel. The special follows leading palaeontologists in the UK and United States as they uncover the rocky tomb of one of the most complete dino mummies ever found and carry out a CT scan on the specimen.

The National Geographic Society partly funded analysis of the mummified dinosaur, including the CT scanning of the fossil. Scientific papers based on study of the dinosaur are in progress.

Tags: dakota, north dakota, dinosaur, mummy

European giant unearthed

Sat, 23 Dec 2006 18:37:13 GMT

clipped by: arifsali

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

European giant unearthed

A giant fossilised dinosaur discovered in Spain may be the biggest land animal ever found on European soil.

The fossils, which date from the late Jurassic period around 150m years ago, include a forelimb larger than a person. Researchers from the Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinópolis in Teruel, Aragón, in eastern Spain, who made the discovery, estimate that the plant-eating Turiasaurus riodevensis would have been 30 to 37 metres long and weighed 40 to 48 tonnes - six or seven elephants.

Jeffrey Wilson, of the Museum of Palaeontology at the University of Michigan, commenting on the study in the journal Science, said that three branches of the sauropod family tree - including the latest find - all independently settled at roughly the same size, possibly due to the maximum weight a skeleton can support or the volume of blood that can be pumped around a body. Sauropods have been found on every continent except Antarctica.

Tags: science, evolution, europe, dinosaurs

Great beasts peppered from space

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 21:56:22 GMT

clipped by: invictus

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Startling evidence has been found which shows mammoth and other great beasts from the last ice age were blasted with material that came from space.

Seven tusks dating to some 35,000 years ago all show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments.

The ancient remains come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks.

The scientists released details of the discovery at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, US.

They painted a picture of a calamitous event over North America that may have severely knocked back the populations of some species.

Tags: archaeology, palaeontology, mammoths, extinction, meteorite, impact

Scary Dinosaurs Ate Meat

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:40:33 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

The dinosaur had a skull about 1.75m long housing huge jaws armed with teeth the size of bananas.

It was part of a "very weird ecosystem" of huge bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs that inhabited the Saharan Cretaceous landscape.

"It was a very strange, very scary community at that time," he added.

Dr Angela Milner, Deputy Keeper of Palaeontology at London's Natural History Museum, said the new find demonstrated that very large carnivorous dinosaurs were more widely distributed in Africa than previously suspected.

Tags: dinsours, meat

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

Between Fish & Tetrapods, Another Gap Filled

Sun, 09 Dec 2007 22:19:01 GMT

clipped by: Teosoma
clipper's remarks: ... demonstrates the predictive capacity of palaeontology ...

Clip Source: scienceblogs.com

Paleontologists have uncovered yet another specimen in the lineage leading to modern tetrapods, creating more gaps that will need to be filled. It's a Sisyphean job, working as an evolutionist.

Tags: evolution

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