An extinct sofa-sized turtle may have lived alongside humans
Science News | Paleontology
by Jake Buehler
17h ago
Peltocephalus maturin was one of the biggest turtles ever, but unlike similarly sized prehistoric freshwater turtles, it lived thousands of years ago ..read more
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A rare 3-D tree fossil may be the earliest glimpse at a forest understory
Science News | Paleontology
by Helen Bradshaw
1M ago
With its fluffed, spiraling top and thin trunk, the Sanfordiacaulis densifolia tree looks like it came straight out of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax. But this isn’t a truffula come to life. It’s a 3-D rendering of a 350 million-year-old fossil that shows something very few other fossils in the world ever have — both a trunk and the leaves of a tree species from a somewhat fuzzy time period in plant history, researchers report February 2 in Current Biology.  “When I first saw [the fossil], I was gobsmacked,” says geologist Robert Gastaldo of Colby College in Waterville, Maine. “Finding this … it ma ..read more
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50 years ago, trilobite eyes mesmerized scientists
Science News | Paleontology
by Cassie Martin
1M ago
Trilobite eyes: An impressive feat of early evolution — Science News, February 2, 1974 [Trilobites] possessed the most sophisticated eye lenses ever produced…. The lens structure does not correspond to any found in modern arthropods, as it developed when trilobites were already a separate stock and doomed to extinction…. Though the trilobites were lavished by nature with this great optical gift, there is no way to know whether the trilobites made full use of it. Update With some 20,000 known species, trilobites were a diverse bunch that went extinct about 250 million years ago. The lense ..read more
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Megalodon, the largest shark ever, may have been a long, slender giant
Science News | Paleontology
by Jake Buehler
2M ago
The largest shark discovered to date — the monstrous Otodus megalodon — may have been a sleek, long-bodied leviathan. A fresh look at the extinct predator’s fossilized remains suggests its body was many meters longer and possibly more slender than previous reconstructions, researchers report January 22 in Palaeontologia Electronica. The findings may offer better insights into the biology and lifestyle of megalodon, including how fast it swam or what it ate (SN: 6/27/23).  Reconstructing what ancient, extinct animals looked like when they were alive is challenging, even when complete fossi ..read more
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The oldest known fossilized skin shows how life adapted to land
Science News | Paleontology
by Nikk Ogasa
2M ago
A dark sliver of rock pulled from an Oklahoma limestone quarry is the world’s oldest fossil cast of skin ever found. The fossil is nearly 290 million years old, and once dressed an early member of the amniotes, a clade of four-legged vertebrates that evolved from amphibians and includes all reptiles, birds and mammals, researchers report January 11 in Current Biology. It’s 21 million years older than the only other reported fossilized skin from the Paleozoic Era, spanning 541 million to 252 million years ago, during which animals moved onshore and diversified. “This is definitively the oldest ..read more
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Earth’s largest ape went extinct 100,000 years earlier than once thought
Science News | Paleontology
by Carolyn Gramling
2M ago
The world’s largest ape vanished from Earth more than 100,000 years earlier than once thought, pushed to extinction as the environment around it shifted, researchers report January 10 in Nature. The new extinction date comes from new analyses of fossils of Gigantopithecus blacki, as well as on the sediments of about a dozen caves in southern China where the ape once dwelled. Instead of dying out around 100,000 years ago, the ape was driven to extinction between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, the team found. The fate of G. blacki, twice the size of the largest modern apes and resembling a super ..read more
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The real culprit in a 19th century dinosaur whodunit is finally revealed
Science News | Paleontology
by Freda Kreier
2M ago
A sledgehammer dealt the final blow to New York City’s dream of a paleontology museum. On May 3, 1871, workers broke into the workshop of famed British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins. Inside, they came upon a plaster skeleton of a towering duck-billed dinosaur — modeled after the first dinosaur fossil unearthed in New Jersey 13 years earlier — alongside a statue of the beast as it would have appeared in life. These were the first 3-D renderings of any North American dinosaur, a testament to the continent’s geologic past that scientists were only just beginning to understand. But the public ..read more
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Ancient primates’ unchipped teeth hint that they ate mostly fruit
Science News | Paleontology
by Erin Garcia de Jesús
2M ago
Soft fruits may have been the main dish on some ancient primate menus. An analysis of hundreds of fossilized primate teeth from the Fayum Depression, a desert basin in Egypt, shows just a handful were fractured, researchers report December 13 in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. So few chipped teeth suggests the animals more often feasted on easy-to-chew foods like fruits rather than hard objects like seeds or nuts that might inflict tooth damage. The more than 400 analyzed teeth belonged to five primate genera — including Propliopithecus, Apidium and Aegyptopithecus — and are a ..read more
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Dinosaur feathers may have been more birdlike than previously thought
Science News | Paleontology
by Saima S. Iqbal
5M ago
Many feathered dinosaurs couldn’t fly — at least, not like birds do today. But the reptiles’ feathers may have been more birdlike than scientists thought. In 2019, fossil analyses found that feathers from a flightless dinosaur mostly contained a different, more flexible form of the keratin protein that makes up modern bird beaks, scales and feathers. Researchers suggested then that feathers had evolved molecularly over time to become stiffer as birds — the last living dinosaurs — took to the skies (SN: 7/31/14). Yet fossilization can change feather proteins, making one keratin protein resemble ..read more
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New computer analysis hints volcanism killed the dinosaurs, not an asteroid
Science News | Paleontology
by Carolyn Gramling
6M ago
For decades, scientists have vigorously debated whether an asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruptions ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Roughly three-quarters of all life on Earth, including all nonbird dinosaurs, went extinct at that time, putting a dramatic end to the Cretaceous Period. Now, researchers have devised a new way to identify the true dino killer: Let computers take a crack at it. The result of that computational effort suggests that massive bursts of gas produced by the Deccan Traps eruptions were solely capable of causing the extinction event, the team r ..read more
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