New research led by UT Austin has found that an impact crater created by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was home to sea life less than a decade after impact.
AUSTIN, Texas — About 66 million years ago, an asteroid smashed into Earth, triggering a mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and snuffed out 75 percent of life. (more…)
A fossil unearthed in Great Britain may end a long-running debate about the mollusks, one of life’s most diverse invertebrate groups: Which evolved first, shelled forms like clams and snails, or their shell-less, worm-like relatives?
The small new fossil, found in marine rocks along the English-Welsh border, provides the best fossil evidence yet that the simpler worm-like mollusks evolved from their more anatomically complex shelled brethren, rather than the other way around. (more…)
*The team scoured more than 500 museum drawers of Green River fossils for crickets and katydids with intact front legs, looking for evidence of ears.*
How did insects get their hearing? A new study of 50-million-year-old cricket and katydid fossils sporting some of the best preserved fossil insect ears described to date are helping to trace the evolution of the insect ear.
According to paleontologist Dena Smith of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History and University of Illinois Professor Roy Plotnick, who collaborated on the new study at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, or NESCent, in Durham, N.C., insects hear with help from some very unusual ears. (more…)
