Pages tagged with Paleontology

Yale University vertebrate paleontologist Stephen Chester commented that bones revealed the beast to have had a mobile ankle joint, just as primates today that live in trees do.

Massive enough to have swallowed a human being whole, meaning that it could conceivably have hunted man between the period two to four million years ago when it existed

Earliest among placental mammals, this creature had a diet of insects, a fleshy nose, a light underbelly in its fur, and a long tail - larger than a mouse, but smaller than a rat.

Even if 99% of all species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct, without the demise of dinosaurs, mammals and birds would never have come to dominate the planet.

The small wingspan and bone structure, led researchers to believe that it would have been able to run around quite easily, but likely not fly, as it sported toes more suitable for walking along the ground.

It would seem that Neanderthal tooth tartar has a story to tell, chemicals and food fragments it contains revealing that our close ancestral relations did indeed gather huddled around fires, which they used to cook and consume plants.

Scientists from Yale and Harvard universities, in naming the new species, combined the Latin Obamadon - Obama's teeth - with gracilis - meaning slender.

It was the absence, in the footprints, of the expected raptor-like claws which helps support the theory that this great bird was no meat-eater, even though it stood 7ft tall with a huge head and beak.

Both sabre-tooth cats would have killed through bites to the throats of immobilized prey, producing a quick death, using their long, flattened upper canines to cut the prey throat, via the pulling down of the heads.

Dubbed Zhenya, after the nickname of the boy who discovered it, this carcass is without doubt the most important such find in living memory, and could offer a great deal more information.

Such ominous looking fangs might suggest the dinosaur to have been a predator, but that parrot-like beak was almost certainly for ate seeds, fruit and nuts.

When discovered in the 1920s on the largest island of England, the fossils had been wrongly identified as belonging to an ant. New analyses suggest instead they belong to a fig wasp.

Researchers found, buried within genetic blueprints of 15 different people, a genetic signature indicative of a human sister species - branching off the human family tree around the time of the Neanderthals.

Humanoids undoubtedly spent time close to water, which would have brought them right to where the crocodiles might have been living.

The 1996 discovery of theropod Sinosauropteryx the start point from which palaeontologists have come to find over 30 types of feathered dinosaur.

Neanderthals, it appears, far from being archetypal for primitive, uncivilised behaviour, were indeed a species - as illuminated through fossil excavations and recent genome analysis - not that different at all from ourselves.

In those ancient times every human was brown-eyes, and the mutation concerned affected the OCA2 gene, involved in the production of the pigment that gives colour to hair, skin and eyes, dubbed melanin

Possibly representing an brand new evolutionary line on the human family tree, with anatomically unique skulls they appear very different to all modern humans. Since they persisted to 11,000 years ago, they must have existed at the same time as modern man, but isolated from them.

This is an article on paleontology. One of the most interesting topics in the field of research in evolutionary biology.