Fossil-hunting expeditions to Tanzania, Zambia and Antarctica provide new insights
Predecessors to dinosaurs missed the race to fill habitats emptied when nine out of 10 species disappeared during Earth’s largest mass extinction 252 million years ago.
Or did they?
That thinking was based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia.
It turns out, however, that scientists may have been looking in the wrong places. (more…)
Scientists build new ‘tree of life’ for placentals, visualize common ancestor
Scientists have reconstructed the common ancestor of placental mammals–an extremely diverse group including animals ranging from rodents to whales to humans–using the world’s largest dataset of both genetic and physical traits. (more…)
When Sifrhippus sandae, the earliest known horse, first appeared in the forests of North America more than 50 million years ago, it would not have been mistaken for a Clydesdale.
It weighed in at around 12 pounds–and it was destined to get much smaller over the ensuing millennia.
Sifrhippus lived during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), a 175,000-year interval of time some 56 million years ago in which average global temperatures rose by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit. (more…)
*In “The Great Dying” 250 million years ago, the end came slowly*
The deadliest mass extinction of all took a long time to kill 90 percent of Earth’s marine life–and it killed in stages–according to a newly published report.
It shows that mass extinctions need not be sudden events.
Thomas Algeo, a geologist at the University of Cincinnati, and 13 colleagues have produced a high-resolution look at the geology of a Permian-Triassic boundary section on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic. (more…)