Paleontology in the News

0 Paleontology in the News

Paleontology in the News

This is a selection of stories, subject to the following rules. First, I don't guarantee close daily coverage of everything that happens (because I have things to do apart from maintaining this Web page). Second, the site has to be generally accessible. (Many journals, like Science and Nature, make new papers accessible only to people or institutions who have paid a subscription to the written version.) Third, I choose newspapers and news sites that tend to keep their pages accessible for more than two weeks over those that do not. Fourth, I keep older articles archived for varying lengths of time, depending how important I think they are (or interesting, at least); whether they have been updated or made redundant; and whether the site has dropped them.

Here also is a site for Anthropology in the News from Texas A & M.

Paleontology in the News

May 9, 2012. A huge Pliocene crocodile in East Africa, contemporary with hominids. Brian Switek's Laelaps blog

May 9, 2012. The smallest mammoths of all time. On the Mediterranean island of Crete, only about 3 feet high at the shoulder. The paper is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. BBC News

May 8, 2012. Nebraska man legally changes his name to Tyrannosaurus Rex. You can't make up stuff like this! Thanks to Mike Brett-Surman, who passed this on to the dinosaur discussion group. York News Times

May 8, 2012. Dinosaur guts produced methane, which warmed the Mesozoic Earth, There are so many assumptions, and extrapolations from small amounts of data, that this is fun but scientifically worthless. The paper is in Current Biology.

May 7, 2012. Origins of domestic horse: on the steppes of Eurasia. The paper is in PNAS. Abstract of the paper

May 3, 2012. Albertonectes, an elasmosaur, the longest of all the plesiosaurs. Brian Switek's Laelaps blog

April 30, 2012. Latest on the Permian extinction. New York Times

April 30. 2012. Underground fossil forest in a Caboniferous coal mine in Illinois. New York Times

April 28, 2012. Why are pygmies short? Natural selection, of course, but in a fascinating way. The paper will be on open access in PLoS Genetics layer this week, and I'll add the URL when I've read it. Chronicle of Higher Education

April 4, 2012. Evolution in the three-spined stickleback. Since the end of the Ice Age, the three-spined stickleback has moved between marine and fresh water as coastlines in northern regions changed with rising sea levels. Many local populations have evolved rapidly in isolation. Now it is clear that much the same mutations have arisen in parallel in many populations, often hitting the same regulatory genes again and again. So massively parallel evolution can occur readily in the right circumstances. Rather a scary thought for cladistics (morphological or genomic), but this is the real world, folks. The paper is in Nature. Nature News

April 4, 2012. Large new tyrannosaur from China had feathers. THis is Yutyrannus. It nails down the display hypothesis that Jere Lipps and I suggested years ago.!

April 2, 2012. Evidence of human use of fire one million years ago. There have been claims for older fire use, back close to 2 Ma, but this evidence is more firmly based. The paper is in press at PNAS. The site is a cave on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. Science Daily

March 29, 2012. A hominid contemporary with Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) had feet that were more tree-friendly than Lucy's. The paper is in Nature this week.

March 26, 2012. The disappearance of the Australian megafauna (coinciding with human arrival) caused mega-changes in the vegetation. New study looks as if it is going to be published in Science. Australian Broadcasting Corporation

March 8, 2012. A bad day in the Solnhofen lagoon. A pterosaur (Rhamphorhynchus) caught a little fish, probably by snatching it out of the surface water during low-level flight. While the fish was still in the pterosaur's throat pouch, possibly within one wing-beat, a large fish (Aspidorhynchus) struck at the pterosaur's wing and pulled it into the water. The pterosaur struggled, and so did the fish, because the pterosaur was too large for it to swallow. But the fish teeth were stuck fast in the elastic fibers on the ptrosaur wing, and the fish couldn't release itself. The pterosaur probably drowned, but the fish would have had a slower death. All participants sank to the anoxic floor of the Solnhofen lagoon, preserving the entire episode for clever paleontologists to reconstruct. And by the way, I seriously doubt that the pterosaur was skimming the water surface, otherwise the big fish would have struck at its beak. I think the pterosaur was clawing for height after its fish catch, and may have touched the water surface with a wing-tip; or the shadow of the wing-tip very near the surface could have triggered the fish to strike. The paper is in PLoS ONE, so is open access.

March 8, 2012. The little feathered dromaeosaur Microraptor from the Lower Cretaceous of China seems to have had iridescent feathers. This is a big deal, because the only reasonable interpretation of those feathers is that they had a display function (as Jere Lipps and I suggested 30 years ago for the origin of feathers). The paper is in Science.

March 2, 2012. Some conifers survived the ice age in Scandinavia, presumably by surviving on nunataks that projeted above the ice sheet, or by occupying isolated refuges that received marine air from the North Atlantic. The evidence is genetic. The paper is in Science. Abstract of paper

March 1, 2012. Bats begin flight with strong tail-flapping at take-off, associated of course with wing movements. This unique adaptation is (I think) likely the secret to the mysterious origin of flight in bats, and I also think this is a breakthrough paper! It is published in PLoS ONE, so is open access. The paper in PLoS ONE

February 29, 2012. Otzi, the ice-man from the Tyrol, was a "medical mess". This comes from sequencing his genome. Science, news piece

February 29, 2012. Giant Cretaceous fleas. Science News

February 29, 2012. Strongest bite of any terrestrial creature: Tyrannosaurus rex. The paper is in Biology Letters. BBC News

February 29, 2012. Beautiful new pterosaur from China: Guidraco. Wired Science

February 29, 2012. The Lord Howe stick insect: survival story! NPR

February 27, 2012. New large penguins from the Miocene of New Zealand. Slightly taller than the emperor enguin, but slimmer. National Geographic News

February 23, 2012. The first horse is now called Sifrhippus. But the science here is that its size dropped during an unusually warm time in Earth history, then increased again afterward as the climate cooled again. This is usually called Bergmann's Rule. The paper is in Science.

New York Times
Abstract of the paper
February 17, 2012. Polar dinosaurs (specifically Edmontosaurus) did not migrate, but endured the winter. The paper is in press at Anatomical Record. Abstract of the paper
February 16, 2012. A news update on the Blombos Cave site for early Homo sapiens in South Africa. Nature News
February 8, 2012. The story of the lost Archaeopteryx, the Maxberg specimen. New Scientist
February 8, 2012. The first land plants caused an ice age at the end of the Ordovician (?). Sounds like a stretch to me. (And the inferences for the Ordovician are based on computer modelling, not facts.) The first land plants would have been tiny and confined to moist coastal areas: in other words, not a vast geographic range. (The paper assumes a range that varies from 5% present-day vegetation on up, but their preferred area is 15%.) The dating of plant invasion of the coast is pathetically inadequate. The paper is in Nature Geoscience. Terra Daily
February 7, 2012. Otavia, from the early Ediacaran, may be the first identifiable sponge. The paper is in the South African Journal of Science, and is open access. Could be: the specimens are very early, but sponges are almost certainly the first of the Metazoa to evolve. The earliest Otavia may be close to 760 Ma, but there are abundant beautiful specimens that are older than 635 Ma.
- National Geographic News
- The paper, on open access
February 3, 2012. The nearest genes for North American founders currently are located among the Kazakhs of the Altai Mountains. National Geographic News
February 1, 2012. Aegisuchus, a bizarre Late Cretaceous crocodile from Morocco, otherwise known as ShieldCroc. The paper is in PLoSOne, so is free access. National Geographic News
January 30, 2012. Making Levallois flakes: an experiment in replicating them shows how skilful the original makers were.
- Past Horizons blog
- The paper in PLoS ONE
January 25, 2012. Baurosuchid crocodiles as theropod mimics: that is, they evolved many parallel features. Brian Switek's blog on Wired.com
January 17, 2012. Evolving multicellular life in 60 days. This is the breakthrough of the year. A team at the University of Minnesota led by UC Davis undergraduate alumnus Will Ratcliff took ordinary (unicellular) brewer's yeast cells and subjected them to selection for rapid sinking through water. Those cells that budded off new cells that stuck to the parent grew into multicellular colonies, which were allowed to continue into the next set of experiments. But the critical thing was that the "colonies" stayed as colonies, and when they reproduced they reproduced by breaking up into two colonies: in other words, they were now behaving and reproducing as multicellular organisms. In fact, when the experiments were over, and the selection was relaxed, none of the colonies reverted to unicellular life. Their DNA had evolved. The take-home message is that it is comparatively simple for unicells to evolve to multicellularity, irreversibly. What seemed to be a huge issue in evolutionary biology is not. Obviously, there is much more research to do, but this is a textbook changer! The paper is in PNAS this week, on open access.
- Wired Science
- NSF press release
- The paper itself is at PNAS. It is clearly written and accessible to readers.
- January 11, 2012. The world's smallest frog. BBC News The paper is in PLoSOne, so it's freely available on the Web at PLoSOne
- January 4, 2012. Experiments confirm that Velociraptor was very agile. Experiments on living agamid lizards and on models make a very convincing case! The paper (and videos) are in Nature this week. Nature news item with video
- December 20, 2011. A living lungfish uses its pathetically weak fins to push on the substrate in a walking kind of behavior. Does that push "tetrapod"-style locomotion way back into the Devonian? Very likely! This is from the Chicago group that discovered Tiktaalik and has done great work on evo-devo in fin evolution. The paper is said to be in press in PNAS. Terra Daily
- December 19, 2011. Engulfment feeding by pelicans and whales. Excellent essay on a wonderful example of parallel evolution. Brian Switek on his Wired Science laelaps blog site
- December 16, 2011. A claim that the disappearance of elephants from the Middle East triggered the rise of modern man. Exceedingly unlikely! I wouldn't imagine that elephants would be easy to hunt! They survived very well until firearms arrived in Africa, for example. And they survived longer in Northern Eurasia than other Pleistocene megafauna. The paper is in PLoS One. News story in Terra Daily
- December 15, 2011. The earliest insect-repelling bedding used by humans. This result comes from paleobotanical analysis of the plants used in bedding layers in a South African rock shelter, dating between 38,000 and 77,000 years BP. Of course, many little birds use insect-repelling plant material in their nests, and who knows how long that has been going on? Even so, this is clearly a fun project. The paper is in press in Science. Seed Daily site
- December 8, 2011. Newly discovered eyes of Anomalocaris have thousands of lenses per eye. Anomalocaris from the Lower Cambrian of South Australia, at 515 Ma, had eyes with more than 16,000 lenses (presumably holochroal lenses) per eye. This matches any modern arthropod. And, don't forget, as arthropods grow they molt, and that includes dropping the outer surfaces of the eye, with all its lenses, and re-growing a new eye to match the software in the form of receptors and nerve system that lay exposed after the molt. The eyes Imply very good vision to go along with the fearsome clawed appendages, confirming Anomalocaris (at around 1 meter, or 3 feet long) as a top predator at this early date. It confirms a scanario in which large predators equipped with good vision and powerful weapons may have encouraged defensive structures in everything around them. Anomalocarids are the sister group of living arthropods, and the new eyes show that they had evolved to such astonishing sophistication on a very weakly armored carapace. A fabulous find, described in Nature this week.
  - Wired Science
- November 22, 2011. What the Pleistocene cave lion of Europe ate. Wired Science
- November 21, 2011. The new Eocene whale Aegyptocetus. It was saved by an alert stone-cutter from being arrayed in a set of ornamental counter top slabs. The slabs are now at the University of Pisa. The paper is in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and is available online (see link below).
  - Brian Switek's essay on his Laelaps blog
  - Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science
  - The paper is available on-line
- November 18, 2011. The Permian extinction now looks much faster than we had thought, and dates link it explicitly to the Siberian Traps eruption. Science journalist piece by Richard Kerr. There is a paper in press in Science,
- November 12, 2011. A Microraptor fossil has a Cretaceous bird in its stomach. OK, great find, but it doesn't mean that Microraptor flew, or even lived in trees: ask your cat how it manages to catch birds! The Economist
- November 3, 2011. A very fine fossil of a dryolestid mammal from the Cretaceous of South America. Great teeth! More evidence of the endemism of South America, even back in the Cretaceous. The paper is in Nature this week. BBC News
- October 28, 2011. Hagfish can be predators as well as scavengers. (If you're really a bad person, you may be reincarnated as a banded redfish.) Open access at Nature Scientific Reports
- October 27, 2011. Lasting effects of the Permo-Triassic extinction? A new paper based on counting taxa of terrestrial vertebrates claims that the effects of the extinction lasted for millions of years. The data may be biased, in ways that we understand but cannot account for. Most obviously, the study was based only on data from two (count them, 2) areas, Russia and South Africa. Some other studies have suggested a fast recovery. And new analyses of Triassic archosauromorphs identify a significant number of "ghost" archosaur groups that must have evolved rapidly in the early Triassic (e.g. Nesbitt 2011). Obviously, not in Russia or South Africa, but *somewhere else* that we haven't sampled yet. Stay tuned..... The paper is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Wired Science
- October 20, 2011. Before Clovis people made those wonderful chert spear-points, their predecessors made effective spear points from mastodon bone. New dates show that "pre-Clovis" people were along the west coast of North America, and were hunting mastodons with points made from mastodon bone. Make what you like of it in terms of a "blitzkrieg", this is now well documented and makes perfect sense. The paper and a comment are in Science this week. BBC News
- October 17, 2011. How Jack Horner thinks we could reverse-engineer a dinosaur. Wired magazine, September.
- October 14, 2011. Processing ochre in Blombos Cave, South Africa: a very early activity for modern humans (100 ka). The first geologists supplied the first cosmetic imdustry? The paper is in Science this week.
  - BBC News
  - New York Times
- October 14, 2011. Living stromatolites found growing on the Giant's Causeway, a spectacular ancient basalt formation on the Irish coast. BBC News
- October 12, 2011, The first rodents arrived in South America in the Eocene (from Africa), much earlier than we had thought. BBC News
- October 12, 2011. The Kraken: an invisible Triassic monster cephalopod. Two excellent essays by Brian Switek. Look, I like Mark McMenamin: he's a fun guy. But this is further over the top than "The Garden of Ediacara".
  - Laelaps blog # 1
  - Laelaps blog #2
- October 7, 2011. The consequences of being an armadillo. The paper in in press in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution. Excellent blog by Brian Switek
- October 4, 2011. The world's largest toothed pterosaur. They said it, not me! This is a piece of a jaw from the Lower Cretaceous of England. I would think it is very risky to extrapolate from that to the wingspan, but it does make for a flashy title for a paper...
  - BBC News
  - Abstract of the paper
- September 26, 2011. The Pleistocene hyena Chasmaporthetes. Review by Brian Switek in his blog Laelaps.
- September 22, 2011. Updating mammalian phylogeny: the importance of the KT event. There is said to be a paper in press at Science. PhysOrg
- September 22, 2011. Australian aborigines: their ancestors left Africa earlier than other sapiens. The paper is said to be coming out in Science today. PhysOrg
- September 21, 2011. The murky academic history of the giant Cretaceous crocodile Deinosuchus. Review by Brian Switek in his blog Laelaps.
- September 20, 2011. Talos, an impressive little troodontid dinosaur from the Cretaceous of Utah. Open access at PLoSOne
- September 19, 2011. The KT asteroid was not from the Baptistina family. Once again, facts spoil a wonderful story. In 2007, asteroid data pointed to the Baptistina group as the likely source of the KT asteroid, which would have been expelled from the asteroid belt after a big collision sometime during the Jurassic. A new and more sophisticated survey shows that this is not the case. It leaves open the question of the provenance of the KT asteroid, but without much doubt the general scenario is correct. We still have to find the source and the timing of its expulsion. The story holds that a random event many millions of years before the KT boyundary set off a chain of events that finished in the KT fireball. Press release from NASA/JPL
- September 19, 2011. Dinosaur and bird feathers trapped in Cretaceous amber from Canada. There are two papers in Science. Terra Daily
- September 19, 2011. Molluscan phylogeny from genomics. Astonishingly, gastropods and bivalves are sister taxa, which implies a lot of parallel evolution toward behavioral complexity between gastropods and cephalopods. The paper is in press in Nature. Terra Daily
- September 16, 2011. A 6-meter (20-foot) crocodile from the Paleocene of Colombia. The paper is in Palaeontology.
  - National Geographic News
  - BBC News
- September 15, 2011. Laccognathus, fearsome lie-in-wait predatory fish from the Devonian of Canada. It was a lobefin, too. The paper is said to be in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
  - Live Science
  - Brian Switek, Laelaps blog
- September 15, 2011. Dinosaur feathers in amber. Two papers in Science this week. National Geographic News
- September 8, 2011. A new paper in Science argues that Australopithecus sediba is the direct ancestor of modern humans. That ancestor has to be a species of Australopithecus. The question is whether A. sediba is the one. Carl Zimmer's blog
- September 7, 2011. A "terror bird" from northwest Africa. Most of them were South American. The paper is in press in Naturwissenschaften. Brian Switek's Laelaps blog
- September 2, 2011. The oldest woolly rhino, from the Miocene of Tibet, gives a clue to the geographical roots of this cold-adapted lineage. The oldest and most basal member of the genus Coelodonta comes from 3-m.y. old sediments high on the Tibetan plateau. Along with it are other early members of the "Pleistocene megafauna". Together, the fossils suggest that Tibet, already a cold plateau, was the region in which the cold-adapted fauna evolved. Then, when the Ice Ages arrived, they were free to spread over the Northern Hemisphere. The paper is in Science. Science Daily
- September 2, 2011. Pumice rafts as the site for the origin of life. Give me a break. It's a good idea, but why publish a paper on it when you could do some experiments? The team are correct when they say, "the idea... deserves to be rigorously explored in the laboratory and the early rock record." Damn right. So go do it. BBC News
- September 1, 2011. Acheulean tools found in very old rocks in Kenya. They date to about 1.76 Ma, which means they arrive in the archaeological record at about the same time as Homo erectus. The paper was in Nature yesterday. Wired Science
- August 31, 2011. The largest cheetah. Acinonyx pardinensis lived alongside Homo erectus in the Caucasus about 1.8 Ma. The paper is in Quaternary Science Reviews (I haven't read it yet).
  - Live Science
  - Thoughtful blog by Brian Switek at Laelaps. Wired Science.
- August 27, 2011. The evolution of a very large mouth in whales. Without this step, which evolved in fish-eating whales, the later evolution of the huge baleen-bearing whales would not have happened. The paper is in press at Biology Letters.
  - BBC News
  - Laelaps blog by Brian Switek Wired Science.
- August 25, 2011. The new little Chinese mammal is Juramaia, from the Jurassic at about 160 Ma. The paper is in Nature. It was tiny and arboreal, insectivorous. But it was also placental (in its dental characters), which means that the split between placentals and marsupials is even older, well back into the Jurassic. BBC News
- August 23, 2011. Brian Switek muses on specimens that document one organism eating another just before it died and was fossilized. Wired Science
- August 22, 2011. Early whales evolved twisted skulls. This was probably for directional hearing, for locating the noises made by their prey in dimly lit waters. It has nothing to do with the echolocation that later (odontocete) whales evolved for locating silent prey: that involves radiating sound as well as receiving it. The asymmetry was an early adaptation among Eocene whales. The paper is in PNAS, in press. The press release contains a beautiful computer image of the asymmetrical skull of Basilosaurus that isn't in the paper. But if you look up the web site of first author Julia Fahlke, you will find that her skull is completely symmetrical. Science Daily
- August 22, 2011. Earth's "oldest fossils". Well, not so fast. This is a paper by the Martin Brasier group. For years they have been running a vicious campaign to discredit the fossils discovered by Bill Schopf many years ago in the Apex Chert, considerably earlier than the fossils discussed by the Brasier group. IMHO, Brasier et al. have not yet succeeded in that endeavor. Now they are describing microfossils that are YOUNGER than Schopf's, and trumpeting them in press releases like this as "oldest". Note that they do not use the "o" word in their actual publication -- as if they are trying to persuade by assertion in press releases! (Well, politicians do that, but scientists should not.) The new paper actually documents the earliest sulfur processing bacteria, and in those terms is a significant paper. I wonder whether Brasier's colleagues are comfortable, complicit, or appalled at the unnecessary distracting distortion in this Oxford-based press release. The paper is in press at Nature Geoscience, where Schopf's latest convincing rebuttal of criticism was published earlier this year (funny that it's not cited). Science Daily, but it's really the Oxford press release
- August 19, 2011. Another baby mammoth found in the Siberian permafrost. MSNBC
- August 18, 2011. When did primates evolve fingernails (rather than claws)? Apparently early: Teilhardina, a small North American primate from the Early Eocene, had nails. The study is said to be published online in the American Journal of Physical Anthopology. Terra Daily
- August 18, 2011. Why Texas Governor Rick Perry wants creationism taught in schools -- and other pronouncements by this candidate for the US Presidency. Terra Daily
- August 18, 2011. Fungal activity helped to destroy forests at the P-T boundary. The paper is in press in Geology. It's another paper by Cindy Looy of UC Berkeley and colleagues. Previously they had argued that the fungi helped rot dead trees at the boundary. The new paper suggests that soil-borne fungal *pathogens* destroyed forests that might have been weakened (by somthing else).
  - Terra Daily
  - Wired Science
- August 17, 2011. A new little jawless fish has a nose that is otherwise only known in jawed fishes. This makes the new fish Shuyu, from the Silurian of China, the best candidate yet to be a direct ancestor of jawed fishes. And it's cute. The research used CAT scanning of the inside of the headshield to reveal the inner structure, which includes paired nasal receptors on each side of the head. The paper is in Nature. Science Daily
- August 17, 2011. A very primitive eel is found swimming in a lagoon on Palau. It is described with great fanfare as a living fossil. The paper is said to be in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, but I didn't see it there! Wired Science
- August 16, 2011. The earliest plant with wood. It's small, and it's early: Lower Devonian. That means that wood (tracheae with thickened walls) didn't evolve to support the plant, but to make stronger pipes for transporting fluid within the plant. The paper is a one-pager in Science last week: no name, no discussion of the evolutionary setting. In fact, the new piece is more informative than the paper! BBC News
- August 16, 2011. New paper on the origin of life on Earth. It is in Nature Chemistry, and I'll comment when I've read it. Terra Daily
- August 11, 2011. A fossil plesiosaur with a large unborn fetus inside it: unambiguous evidence of live birth in this marine reptile group. The paper is in Science today.
  - PhysOrg from the LA County Museum
  - Blog by Brian Switek at Laelaps
  - abstract from the Science paper
- August 9, 2011. Tracks of Australian polar dinosaurs. (Not exactly a "huge" group, but important.) The paper is in Alcheringa. Wired Science
- August 5, 2011. Australian polar dinosaurs show no hint of hibernation. This comes from studying the growth rings in the femur, which are just like those of temperate and tropical dinosaurs. Now what this means for the ecology of polar dinosaurs remains to be clarified, but the facts are now clearly laid out. The paper is open access at PLoS One. Terra Daily
- July 29, 2011. Early human populations were larger than those of contemporary Neanderthals. We need to know why, but the difference is clearly significant. The paper is in Science this week. Wired Science
- July 28, 2011. How mosasaurs adapted to an ocean-going life. The paper is in Paleobiology, and I haven't read it yet. Blog by Brian Switek
- July 27, 2011. Archaeopteryx may be a dromaeosaur, rather than the first bird. This happens because Xiaotingia, a new feathered dromaeosaur from the late Jurassic of China, shares enough characters with Archaeopteryx to "pull" it over into the dromaeosaurs. New discoveries may pull Archaeopteryx back again, of course, but any gap between dromaeosaurs and birds is clearly narrowing. So what's the earliest bird ("avialan) now? Epidexipteryx, from Mongolia (but you knew that). The paper by Xing Xu and colleagues, with a commentary by Larry Witmer, is in Nature today.
  - Matt Kaplan for Nature news
  - Wired Science
  - Live Science
- July 21, 2011. Pissarachampsa, a "badass" crocodile from the Cretaceous of Brazil. It was a fast-running, terrestrial crocodile with serious canine-like teeth. The paper is in PLoSOne, but Brian Switek's blog is suitably vivid. Brian Switek's blog on Wired Science
- July 21, 2011. The end-Triassic mass extinction may have been largely caused by a methane-induced global temperature change. The paper is in Science this week, with a commentary, so you wouldn't expect this Science news article to be unduly critical. Having said that, it's a nice paper. What it does is to document a radical shift in carbon isotopes in land plants exactly at the boundary. Then modelling suggests that you had to have methane release to get such a rapid effect. The analog is the end-Paleocene shift (which didn't case huge extinctions). The idea doesn't rule out the massive volcanic eruptions that marked the boundary, though the paper dismisses it. After all, something had to start the methane release, and that something isn't discussed in the paper, possibly for space reasons, and possibly because it would be speculative... Science news article
- July 21, 2011. A fossilized pregnant lizard from the Cretaceous of China. Lizards typically lay eggs,but many lineages have independently evolved live birth. This is the oldest yet. The paper is in Naturwissenschaften, so is not freely available on the Web. BBC News
- July 19, 2011. Pocket of rare "Mediterranean" genes in northeast Wales. Doesn't have any notable historical connection, and isn't a particularly isolated area compared with other parts of Wales: they need more study, perhaps even published! But then it's a stretch to name the local University Glyndwr. The great Welsh chieftain is not particularly associated with that area. BBC News
- July 19, 2011. A new genetic analysis places turtles as the sister group of lizards among living reptiles. That is, they are lepidosaurs rather than archosaurs. They probably LOST their temporal opening to be secondarily "anapsid". The analysis is based on small stretches of DNA called microRNAs, which seems to be more reliable than older methods because the microRNA stretches, once formed, do not seem to change very much, even in geological time, because that do not code for anything, as far as we know. The paper is in press in Biology Letters. Nature news site
  July 18, 2011. More evidence that humans interbred to a limited extent with Neanderthals, but only outside Africa since Neanderthals evolved outside Africa. The paper is in Molecular Biology and Evolution.
  - Wired Science
  - Terra Daily
  VACATION GAP, SLOWLY BEING FILLED
  July 6, 2011. Photosynthesis confirmed in stromatolites at 3.3 Ga. No surprise, just honest analysis. Not published yet. Nature news site
- July 5, 2011. The enigmatic fossil Nectocaris from the Burgess Shale. First though to be a crustacean (hence the name), then a cephalopod, this animal is probably an anomalocarid. But the question is far from settled. Good overall summary of the various interpretations by Brian Switek. Laelaps blog on Wired Science
- July 1, 2011. The amazing eyes of the early Cambrian crustacean Tuzoia. The paper is in Nature this week (but no free access!). Terra Daily
- June 29, 2011. Head-butting in Stegoceras: the skull is strongly adapted for it. This new study is in PLoSOne, on open access.
  - Wired Science
  - The paper
- June 29, 2011. The tail weaponry of Kentrosaurus -- its "thagomizer". This study is open access at Palaeontologia Electronica.
- June 23, 2011. (Not paleontology, but certainly selection!) Why do (other peoples') dogs bark so !!*&&*!! much? Because humans have bred them to do so... Wired Science
- June 20, 2011. What is the Australian pliosaur Kronosaurus really like? Fascinating blog by Brian Switek. Wired science
- June 15, 2011. Mary Schweitzer DID find genuine protein collagen in tyrannosaur bones. Ed Yong in Nature News. The paper is open access at PLoS One. PLoS One
- June 13, 2011. A new paper says that the invention of stomata was critical for land plants. We knew that! What's new is the discovery of ACTIVE stomata, which react to changes in carbon dioxide in the air, and so on. Active stomata are now known in some of the most primitive land plants, showing that *active* stomata appeared very early indeed. The paper is in Current Biology: actually there are two papers. Terra Daily
- June 7, 2011. Coelacanths live a (very) long time. The paper was in Marine Biology. Matt Kaplan for National Geographic
- June 13, 2011. Domesticating rice: directed "artificial" selection plus human behavior. The paper is open access at PLoS Genetics. Terra Daily
- June 7, 2011. Claim that Homo erectus first appeared in the Caucasus. The paper is in press at PNAS. The dates for H. erectus at Dmanisi are just slightly older than those from East Africa, but that could reverse with the next discovery, or the next refinement of East African dating. We have to deal with the reality of extensive early H. erectus dispersal, whatever the resolution of the dates, and with the recognition of other early Homo (later than Dmanisi) in Eurasia, including H. floresiensis. The next few years should be interesting!
  - Science News
  - Wired Science
- May 27, 2011. Another nail in the coffin of the standard Snowball Earth model. Terra Daily
- May 26, 2011. Hans Fricke: the man who swims with coelacanths. Wired Science
- May 25, 2011. Ordovician anomalocarids discovered in Morocco (long after the Burgess Shale from which they were first described). The paper is in Nature. Good perspective from Brian Switek of Laelaps. WIred Science
- May 24, 2011. Mescalerolemur, a new primate from the early Cenozoic of Texas. Good perspective from Brian Switek of Laelaps. I haven't read the paper yet: it is in the Journal of Huyman Evolution. Wired Science
- May 23, 2011. Xilousuchus is a reptile from China that is said to show that the crocodilian archosaurs had already split from dinosaurian archosaurs early in the Triassic. I haven't read the paper yet. Terra Daily
- May 23, 2011. Another advantage for bipedal stance: the forelimbs can be more effective weapons. This study is specifically aimed at hominids, but has implications for other tetrapods. The study was done by David Carrier, and the paper is open access on PLoSOne. Terra Daily
- May 20, 2011. The University of California is apparently blocking the study of some vitally important specimens of early Americans. I am ashamed at this outrageous behavior at the top levels of administration at my University, especially as it comes in the face of letters written by internationally distinguished members of the UC faculty. Wired Science
- May 20, 2011. Two Jurassic mammal skulls subject to CT scans show dramatic changes in brain size and proportions during the Triassic and Jurassic. These changes are compatible with the morphological changes in early mammals as they faced the radiation of dinosaurs. The surviving mammals became small, possibly nocturnal and burrow-dwelling. It makes a nice adaptive story. The paper is in Science this week. Wired Science
- May 17, 2011. Earliest metazoans and cyanobacterial mats. This is a very good paper, with a very reasonable synthesis. I have refered to stromatolites in "History of Life" as "evolutionary forcing houses", ever since the first editiomn in 1990. But it is a simple extrapolation (that I didn't think of) to extend that thought to cyanobacterial mats that did not form stromatolites. The team studied metazoans living close to microbial mats in Venezuela, then looked for analogues in the fossil record of the Ediacaran: and found them! The paper is in Nature Geoscience. It's a shame that the paper is not open access on the Web: but the abstract is quoted in the news report.
  - Phys.org site
  - Matt Kaplan for Nature News
- May 17, 2011. Polynesian immigrants wiped out a big land crab that lived in Hawaii. The paper is open access at PLoSOne.
  - BBC News
  - PLoSOne
- May 13, 2011. Neanderthals may have been pushed into far northern Russia by advancing Homo sapiens. A set of tools that has been linked only with Neanderthals has been found in the northern Urals along the Pechora River. The dates are later than most Neanderthal sites elsewhere, though radiocarbon dating is going through another phase of self-doubt for dates older tham 25,000 years. What we really need are bones at this Byzovaya site. The paper is in Science this week.
  - National Geographic News
  - John Hawks has a major problem with this paper. John Hawks blog
- May 11, 2011. Crocodiles may have crossed the Atlantic about 7 million years ago, to colonize North America. The evidence is genetic. New Scientist
- May 9, 2011. Fearsome jaws on a Permian conodont. The paper is said to be in press at PNAS, but I haven't seen it yet. I'll back-fill with comments here if necessary. Live Science
- May 9, 2011. Changes in behavior and diet during the life of a Tarbosaurus. The paper is in the new issue of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
  - Larry Witmer's Lab project page, with great images for your classes.
  - PDF of the paper, open access and posted from the Witmer Lab at Ohio University. Thank you!
- May 9, 2011. Pucadelphys, a little marsupial from the earliest Cenozoic of Bolivia, was socially gregarious. Almost all marsupials today except for kangaroos and wallabies are morose loners, so people have thought that marsupials were originally that way. That's a contrast with placental mammals, many of whom are gregarious. So this new discovery, based on two clans of Pucadelphys apparently buried in their burrows in a mudslide, changes the picture considerably. Nice paper, due to come out in Nature, and a well-written news story by Matt Kaplan. Nature News. The same story was published in Scientific American News.
- May 6, 2011. Tooth marks on the jaw of a Cretaceous ichthyosaur from Australia were likely made by a member of the same species... The paper is on open access on Acta Paleontologica Polonica. Terra Daily
- May 5, 2011. Major breakthroughs in angiosperm history came with increased venation on the leaves. The paper is in press at PNAS. Terra Daily
- April 22, 2011. An Early Cretaceous mammal from China has a middle ear structure that is transitional between the ears of early basal mammals and their advanced descendants. The paper was in Nature last week.
  - Terra Daily
  - Fine mini-essay by Brian Switek
- April 21, 2011. An extinct marsupial from Queensland, Australia that ate snails (judging from its teeth). We can make this interpretation because a skink that lives in today's equivalent ecosystem (rainforest Queensland) has teeth that look almost eactly the same: and we KNOW it gobbles snails after cracking their shells. By one of those quirks of evolutionary fate, the marsupial probably lost out to the reptile in competition as Australia's ecosystems changed in the Miocene and Pliocene. Live Science The paper is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.
- April 20, 2011. A bizarre environment in which modern stromatolites flourish: in freshwater lakes in Antarctica, under a close-to-permanent ice cover. What's more, they include conical forms that look very much like the conical forms of the earliest stromatolites from the Archaean Warrawoona rocks in Australia. Our very own Dawn Sumner of UC Davis is a member of the research team. Science News
- April 19, 2011. What can the eye sockets of dinosaurs tell us about their habits? Different dinosaurs may have been most active in daylight, or at night, or at dawn or dusk. The paper is in press in Science, and comes from Ryosuke Motani of the Department of Geology at UC Davis, and his graduate student Lars Schmitz :-).
  - Terra Daily
  - Story by Matt Kaplan for Nature News
- April 19, 2011. Australopithecus sediba may be the species of Australopithecus most like Homo. Its ancestor, or a residual close relative? Wait for more evidence. This is a talk at a meeting, no paper yet. Wired Science
- April 18, 2011. Orangutans learn from one another how to catch fish with the help of tools. This is a talk at a meeting, no paper yet. Wired Science
- April 15, 2011. Early birds, and their dinosaur ancestors, had a good sense of smell. Many birds today still do, but the overwhelming majority we see in our gardens are advanced birds that have largely lost that talent. The evidence is overwhelming, and comes from CAT scans that trace the brain shape of living and fossil birds and dinosaurs. The paper is in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
  - Terra Daily
  - Free download of the paper . From the Witmer Laboratory at Ohio University. Thank you!
  - Essay by Larry Witmer
- April 14, 2011. Stromatolites that are growing in an ice-covered lake in Antarctica. The light is seasonal, and dim, but cyanobacteria form stromatolites in what is probably a "Precambrian", microbial ecosystem. The team of researchers includes our very own Dawn Sumner of UC Davis!!! A paper is due soon in Geobiology. Wired Science
- April 14, 2011. Chitons seem to have visual capability from tiny lenses made of aragonite crystals. These are not "rock", for heavens' sake, but they are unique, as far as I know, and really clever. Though the eyes are small, they seem to be image-forming, and the chitons that have them respond to danger signals. The paper is in press in Current Biology. National Geographic News
- April 14, 2011. An interesting study on languages. It turns out that languages in the known "cradle of Homo sapiens", Africa, have far more sounds than those on the fringes of the human migrations. (Hawaiian, for example, has the least variety of sounds.). What it means is up for discussion.... but it seems to me that the vast tonal repertoire of Chinese cannot have been accommodated properly in the study. Terra Daily
- April 13, 2011. Daemonosaurus, a theropod from the earliest Jurassic of New Mexico. The paper is in the Proceedings of the Royal Society (of London, of course). National Geographic News
- April 6, 2011. A trace fossil that consists of the impression of a flying insect landing on a mud surface in the Late Carboniferous. It was made by an adult mayfly. The paper is in PNAS this week. National Geographic news
- April 5, 2011. Decuriasuchus, a new genus of Triassic rauisuchians, found in a bone-bed in Brazil. The paper is in Naturwissenschaften. Fine essay by Brian Switek at Laelaps.
- April 5, 2011. Reconstruction of ancient proteins suggests that the early Earth was hotter and more acidic than it is now. Terra Daily
- March 31, 2011. Giant tyrannosaur from the Cretaceous of China. It's about the same size as T. rex. but is definitely a new genus, Zhuchengtyrannus. The paper is in Cretaceous Research. BBC News
- March 30, 2011. A wonderful soft-bodied hemichordate from the Cambrian of China. The paper is in Current Biology. Terra Daily
- March 25, 2011. A beetle larva that rolls up and rolls away downwind to escape. Yet another example of convergent evolution: see his list of comparable adaptations at the end. The paper is on open access at PLoSOne.
  - Ed Yong's Not Exactly Rocket Science blog.
  - PLoSOne
- March 24, 2011. Spatial sorting: a new variant of natural selection. This is a brilliant and utterly convincing paper by Shine et al., in press and open access at PNAS. There's only a passing reference to the application of the mechanism to human evolution. Whether you are descended from aggressive migrators or stay-at-homes, there's food for thought!
  - News report by Brendan Keim on Wired Science
  - The paper, beautifully clear in its presentation
- March 24, 2011. The best-documented pre-Clovis site so far in interior North America. The site is in Texas, and shows a pre-Clovis tool assemblage well underneath Clovis tools, which themselves lie under Folsom tools. OSL dates support the stratigraphy. It would be nice to have carbon dates as well some day: I'm sure critics will demand that. But so far the story is good, and the OSL dates say that the small pre-Clovis tools are perhaps 2000 years earlier than Clovis, and comparable with dates from the West coast of both North and South America. The paper is in Science this week.
  - BBC News
  - Story by Matt Kaplan for Nature News
- March 24, 2011. A new saber-toothed therapsid. This one is Permian, so it's the earliest sabertooth. The new basal anomodont Tiarajudens, from Brazil, is clearly vegetarian. The paper is in Science this week (so it's not open access on the Web). National Geographic News
- March 24, 2011. Another island giant: this time it's the giant rabbit Nuralagus from the Pliocene of what is now the Mediterranean island of Minorca. A 24-pound rabbit! The paper is said to be in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, but it hasn't reached me yet. Brian Switek (Laelaps) on Wired Science site
- March 21, 2011. Another unpublished Stanley Miller experiment. This one, discovered in his old laboratory, used hydrogen sulfide as well as the usual ingredients, and was very successful in forming amino acids. The hydrogen sulfide promotes volcanic gases as an important source of prebiotic materials. The paper is in press and on open access in PNAS.
  - Wired Science
  - Ed Yong's blog
- March 9, 2011. Did the North American megafaunal extinction lead to the extinction of some cowbird species? While it's a reasonable suggestion, I'm not sure one could prove it. But I haven't read the paper yet: it's in press in PPP. Terra Daily
- March 8, 2011. "The most Earth-like planet" found by Kepler is hopelessly uninhabitable. Show how tenuous these search algorithms are.... Discover magazine 80 beats blog
- March 7, 2011. Bacteria in a meteorite!!??!! Here we go again, another decade, another NASA scientist. I'm a sceptic, but those who know a lot more than I do think it's rubbish.
  - Bad Astronomy blog at Discover site
  - Rosie Redfield's blog
- March 4, 2011. PaleoIndian contemporaries of Clovis lived in the California Channel Islands. They made and used sophisticated tools suitable for dealing with a marine-based food supply, including fish, molluscs, and traded with the mainland. The tools are very different from the mainland cultures. The paper is in Science this week. BBC News
- March 1, 2011. Larval brachiopods have eyespots, and apparently use them to move toward light. This, of course, sounds like a larval adaptation for larvae that move toward early life in the plankton (as they do in this species, Terebratalia transversa, and I would bet that it occurs in a myriad planktonic larvae. Even so, this is a really neat discovery which will play out for years, The paper is in EvoDevo.
  - Carl Zimmer in the New York Times
  - Provisional abstract on open access.
- March 1, 2011. Hagfish are even more repulsive than we thought...
  - Ed Yong's blog
  - Susan Milius on Wired Science
- February 26, 2011. How living Onychophora trap their prey. (Maybe their Cambrian ancestors did too, but probably not, because their "goo" has to dry out.)
  - Brian Switek in his laelaps blog
  - Ed Yong's blog
- February 24, 2011. Strange behavior in a Cambrian arthropod. Brian Switek in his Laelaps blog
- February 23, 2011. Neanderthals wore feathers as accessories? That's the reasonable conclusion from a study of bird bones in an Italian cave inhabited by Neanderthals about 44,000 years ago. Cuts made by tools on the bird bones indicated that the wings were held out and cut off. The birds were not particularly gourmet delights, but they did have large colored feathers! The paper is in press at PNAS. Discovery news item
- February 23, 2011. Diania, a new lobopod from the Cambrian of China. It looks as if it is evolving arthropod-like limbs, possibly in parallel with arthopods, because Diania is a lobopod not a main-stream arthropod. The paper is in Nature this week, so no open-access for you!
  - Nature news piece
  - Ed Yong's blog
- February 22, 2011. A new brontosaur from Utah, Brontomerus, whose name means "thunder thigh"! The research groups interprets it as having had a very powerful kick... The paper is in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, and is open access. BBC News
- February 22, 2011. Photogallery of coelacanths. These are from the relatively shallow water population on the coast of South Africa. National Geographic magazine, March issue 2011.
- February 20, 2011. A new paper suggesting that Bill Schopf's "first fossils", from the Apex Chert of the Pilbara Craton in Australia, are not biological. What is remarkable about this news story is the level of viciousness by allegedly legitimate scientists: especially by Martin Brasier of Oxford University. There have been heated arguments about these fossils ever since Schopf described them. A quick summary: Several processes can generate inorganic blobs of chemicals in rocks, and blobs in chert have often been mistaken for fossil cells. Cell-like structures in the Apex Chert, a formation in the Warrawoona rocks dated at 3465 Ma, have been bitterly disputed. Some researchers call them genuine Archean cells. Others say they are not. Everyone agrees that the Apex Chert contains carbon that was once part of living cells. The new investigation team didn't examine Schopf's specimens, but specimens they collected themselves that may or may not be the same as Schopf's. The new investigation suggested that Schopf's group mistook hematite for carbon, even though Schopf's group is experienced in examining other, undisputed carbonaceous Precambrian fossils with the same techniques. It's a vicious, steaming pile of you-know-what. And when all is said and done, all these arguments cannot hide the reality that locally huge areas of the Warrawoona coastline, close to this time as 3430 Ma, were covered with stromatolites teeming with life. There's every reason to expect the discovery of indisputable cyanobacteria in these rocks, then everyone can crawl back into their caves.
  - Matt Kaplan for Nature news service
  - Abby's Reef, a huge stromatolitic formation at 3430 Ma
- February 16, 2011. Arctotherium, the largest bear of all time (Pleistocene of South America). Blog by Brian Switek on Wired Science
- February 16, 2011. A new Ediacaran locality contains what look like varied algae. These contrast with "more normal" Ediacaran fossils because they are from a different environment and are in a different preservation style. The paper is in Nature with a comment by Guy Narbonne. Wired Science
- February 13, 2011. Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy) had an arched foot, which is a character for walking, rather than tree-climbing. This isn't a game-changer, because we already have footprints of hominids walking upright from this time (see my 1990 limerick from History of Life). But it is a step forward (sorry!). It makes it very likely that the footprints at Laetoli were made by A. afarensis, on the basis of choosing the simplest hypothesis.
  If the trackway story's correct
  It shows something we didn't expect:
  There they are, hand in hand,
  Making tracks in the sand
  And the male's walking fully erect.
  - Nature news story by Matt Kaplan
  - Terra Daily
- February 12, 2011. The real story on Titanis, the "terror bird". Usual high-quality blog by Brian Switek. Laelaps blog on Wired Science
- February 9, 2011. Great new locality that is yielding Ice Age fossils in Colorado. National Geographic photogallery
- February 9, 2011. A new look at acoels disturbs the metazoan cladogram. Acoels are little worm-like blobs, but their genes suggest that they are deuterostomes that have secondarily lost structures like a gut and a coelom. They are no longer the simplest animals above coelenterates. Stay tuned for controversy before acceptance! The paper is in Nature this week. Wired Science
- February 8, 2011. How snakes lost their legs. Close analysis of a Late Cretaceous snake fossil. The paper is said to be in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, but I don't see it there (yet). BBC News
- February 5, 2011. Natural selection among humans: botulism in Alaska. Wired Science
- February 4, 2011. The functional morphology of the woodpecker's head. The paper is in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. New Scientist
- February 4, 2011. Which animal has the most genes? Daphnia, the water flea. 31,000 or so: humans have 20,000 to 25,000. Wired Science
- February 1, 2011. The largest fossil bear of all time, Arctotherium from southern Argentina. Bears had reached South America across the new land bridge at Panama, maybe 2.5 Ma. As carnivores with relatively few competitors, their large size in South America is not surprising, but it's still impressive! The paper is in the new Journal of Paleontology. Live Science
- January 31, 2011. Titanoceratops, a relatively early ceratopsian with a huge skull. The fossil is from the American Southwest, which turns out to have had an endemic fauna of dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. The paper is in Cretacous Research. Wired Science
- January 31, 2011. More about the properties of bacterial biofilms. They've had lots of time to evolve these astonishing properties: biofilms were a necessary character of the first stromatolites, 3.5 b.y. ago or more. The paper is in PNAS. Wired Science
- January 31, 2011. An apparent violation of "Dollo's Law". Dollo said that a character once lost could not be re-evolved. This is an ancient observation, not a law, and we now know a lot more about evo-devo: the way that genes control morphology. We now know that the morphology can be lost, while the genes that control it may be retained. Now we have an example. Frogs today typically don't have teeth on the lower jaw. But they carry tooth-specifying genes, because thay have teeth on the upper jaw. The tropical frog Gastrotheca has teeth on its lower jaw, presumably by re-activating the gene that used to specify teeth on the lower jaw of all frogs 200 m.y. ago. All this means that Dollo's "Law" is not a law at all, just a generalization. The paper is in Evolution. BBC News
- January 27, 2011. Reported discovery of Clovis-type points associated with gomphothere skeletons in Mexico. No paper: this is essentially a press release. Art Daily
- January 27, 2011. The sizes of dinosaurs: why so much bigger than mammals? No answers, but a very sane discussion by Brian Switek. Laelaps blog on Wired.com
- January 26, 2011. New evidence on the Permo-Triassic extinction: fly ash deposits in Canada. The paper is in press in Nature Geoscience Terra Daily
- January 25, 2011. A new and highly derived Cretaceous alvarezsaur from China. It is down to one finger on the hand. The paper is in press in PNAS.
  - Smithsonian blog by Brian Switek
  - Blog by David Hone
  - National Geographic News
- January 20, 2011. A Jurassic pterosaur from China is found preserved next to its egg. This confirms sexual dimorphism in ptereosaurs, and also shows that they laid rather soft-shelled eggs, like lizards rather than birds. The authors say that this shows pterosaurs did not have high metabolic rates, but I don't follow that logic. The paper is in Science this week.
  - BBC News
  - Live Science
  - Darren Naish blog, part 1
- January 19, 2011. Slime molds "farm" fungus gardens. The paper is in Nature this week. Wired Science
- January 18, 2011. Well, guess what? The much heralded "Earth-like" planet Gliese 581g, may not exist AT ALL. A new and much more thorough analysis fails to reveal any evidence of a planet in that orbit. So throw away your oh-so-attractive NASA-funded artist's rendering of the planet that you were showing your classes. Wired Science. Previous stories:
  - Another "Earth-like" exoplanet. This one is a planet of Gliese 581. Three to four times Earth's mass, a 37-day orbit that means it's very close to its cool star, and it has one side that is permanently fried and another side that is permanently frozen. If that's the best they can do..... In addition to that, "habitable" is a flexible concept. The Moon is in the "habitable zone" of our Solar System but is completely uninhabitable. Venus would be habitable except for its enormous greenhouse atmosphere. The new planet is in the "habitable zone" as long as you assume it has an Earth-like greenhouse atmosphere. But without knowing its geology, one can't really tell.
  - Arstechnica site September 30, 2010
  - Bad Astronomy blog September 30, 2010
  - The "habitable" planet recently trumpeted may not exist. Wait and see. Wired.com. October 12, 2010.
- January 16, 2011. Curating mistake gives a new fossil an inappropriate name. It's easy enough to include full information if you donate a fossil to a museum. This is what happens when you don't. Toronto Globe and Mail
- January 15, 2011. Short summary of the giant Carboniferous arthropod Arthropleura. Blog by Hans-Dieter Sues on National Geographic site
- January 13, 2011. Eodromaeus, a very early theropod dinosaur. But its characters shove Eoraptor over as a (small toothy) basal sauropod(omorph)! Matt Kaplan in Nature News
- January 13, 2011, Strike another whole class of stars off the list of those that might have life-hosting planets: red dwarfs. That's 70% of the stars in our galaxy, by the way.....
  - BBC News
  - Discovery magazine story
  - Press release
  - National Geographic News
- January 10, 2011. Is this paleontology? Trace fossil, perhaps... The oldest identified wine-processing site, 4000 BC, in Armenia. TRhe paper is in the Journal of Archaeological Science. National Geographic News
- January 7, 2011. Revised story about the Cretaceous dinosaur stampede recorded by footprints in the Lrk Quarry site, Winton, Queensland, Australia. I missed this when Brian Switek reported on it last month. It turns out that the "theropod" footprints that allegedly caused small onrithopods to flee were from a hadrosaur. There still was a stampede, but now we don't know why. Another good story ruined by better data! Brian Switek in Smithsonian
- January 7, 2011. A Cambrian low-oxygen crisis. This study documents a several-million-year crisis in which low-oxygen seawater invaded the continental shelf and drove many species to extinction. This won't be the only case, but it underlines the fact that late Proterozoic and early Paleozoic oceans were well oxygenated only in surface waters, so were vulnerable to rather minor fluctuations in ocean chemistry. The paper is a convincing one, in Nature this week (so not generally available online). Terra Daily
- January 6, 2011. The diet of ammonites. A few ammonites have jaws and radula preserved in the body chamber along with assorted bits of shell from their prey. Sophisticated synchotron emission analysis shows that some Cretaceous ammonites captured larger prey, while others ate plankton. The paper is in Science this week. BBC News
- January 4, 2011. A recently extinct flightless ibis from Jamaica had a wing that had evolved into a club. The paper is in the online version of the Proceedings of the Royal Society (see link below).
  - BBC News
  - Terra Daily
  - Excellent essay by Brian Switek on his Laelaps blog
  - The paper, open access from the Royal Society
- December 30, 2010. A new marine crocodile from the Jurassic of Italy. National Geographic News
- December 22, 2010. Optical illusions built into Paleolithic art? I'd be sorry if this hypothesis turns out to be wrong: it's such a great idea by the author, and a wonderful suggestion about Paleolithic artists. National Geographic News
- December 22, 2010. A new lineage of early humans, alongside "moderns" and Neanderthals. These are the Denisovans, known from a cave in Siberia. This is a major discovery, only possible because DNA could be extracted from a Denisovan bone. The paper is in Nature.
  - Wired Science
  - National Geographic News
  - Long essay by John Hawks
- December 22, 2010. Several lineages of theropods became vegetarian. The paper is in press at PNAS. Terra Daily
- December 21, 2010. A Neanderthal family group from El Sidron, Spain, killed and eaten by other Neanderthals. John Hawks comments on a paper that is in press at PNAS. John Hawks blog
- December 21, 2010. Many gene families may date back to a burst of genetic innovation around 3 billion years ago. Well, that's the claim, and it's certainly possible. I wonder how they calibrated it, given that it's based on gene analyses made on *living* organisms. The paper is said to be online at Nature, and I'll modify this entry when I read it. Terra Daily
- December 21, 2010. A Neanderthal family killed and eaten by other Neanderthals. The discovery was made in Spain, and the paper is in press at PNAS. BBC News
- December 15, 2010. Life during a Precambrian glaciation. The headline says this paper shows how life survived Snowball Earth. In fact, it has been clear for several years that there was no late Precambrian "snowball earth", and that what we had was a Slushball Earth. The new paper significantly improves the documentation of Slushball Earth: it is in Geology. BBC News
- December 14, 2010. "The Day The Algae Died". I read this, trying to find some science in it. There is none. It's a puff piece about some research that NASA money is going to fund. It's not just that they don't have any results yet, they haven't done any research yet!!! NASA's record of science by press release reaches a new low. Terra Daily
- December 14, 2010. Humans arriving in New Zealand - the Maori about 800 years ago, and the British about 150 years ago, radically altered the native vegetation by fire. The paper is in PNAS. Terra Daily
- December 11, 2010. A bacterium that can use arsenic instead of phosphate (if it has to). Science journalists were fed juicy quotes that the scientists were unwilling to put in the paper. When I hear a scientist saying how humble she is in the face of her brilliant discovery, I reach for my book of great quotes. Winston Churchill, describing a political rival: "A humble little man, wth much to be humble about." Here's what the paper actually says. A bacterial community lives on the floor of Mono Lake in arsenic-rich sediments (the lake chemistry is really weird). Culture a spoonful of those bacteria in the lab. Pick out one colony, artificially decrease its phosphate supply, and give it arsenate instead. Those bacteria don't grow half as quickly, and they place arsenic in biochemical positions where phosphorus used to be (the elements are close in properties). But they do survive and they do grow, even with arsenic in their DNA where phosphprus used to be. That is extraordinary, and was only found because the members of the team had predicted it, and looked for it. BUT these were ordinary bacteria until they were force-fed arsenic, and they would surely replace their arsenic-laden molecules if provided with a new phosphate supply (for some reason, the team did not do that experiment). It's perfectly possible that the biochemical tolerance of arsenic evolved long ago because of occasional phosphorus starvation in the muds of Mono Lake. In fact, I hereby predict that the same sort of biology will be found in many other "toxic" environments if NASA would fund the $$$ to finance such a search. This is NOT the "shadow biosphere" that seems to be the new mystical catch phrase. This is not a "second Genesis", a phrase that I have also seen. This has no relevance to searching for life elsewhere, because, again, these are Earth bacteria with Earth DNA that have evolved a specific, and desperate, reaction to arsenic poisoning. In summary, this paper describes an extraordinary tolerance mechanism, but not a new kind of alien life. The paper is in press in Science. Wired.com
  ADDENDA. Dr. Rosie Redfield has written a blog that contains lethal objections to the paper. If the objections are valid, then the evidence presented by the authors does not support their extravagant claims. The blog is being revised and polished continuously to take into account relevant comments. Wait and see.... Rrresearch blog by Rosie Redfield, version as of December 4, 2010
  And here is a different but equally devastating critique: Guest blog by Dr. Alex Bradley, December 5, 2010.
  And here is an informal poll of major scientists on the paper, taken by Carl Zimmer for Slate magazine: Slate magazine, December 7, 2010.
  And here is an overview of an eventful week: Ed Yong's blog in Discover, December 11, 2010.
- December 8, 2010. It's too simplistic to say that crocodiles are living fossils. This is documented in a new SVP Memoir. BBC News
- December 7, 2010, Giant fossil marabou stork found on the island of Flores. The paper is in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. BBC News
- December 6, 2010. Unique preservation of fossils in the Ordovician Soom Shale Lagerstätte in South Africa. The paper is in Geology.
  - Wired Science
  - Press release
- December 3, 2010. The diets of giant ground sloths. Blog essay by Brian Switek. Laelaps blog on Wired.com
For stories archived from 2010, see Paleontology News 2010
For stories archived from 2009, see Paleontology News 2009
For stories archived from 2008, see Paleontology News 2008
For stories archived from 2007, see Paleontology News 2007
For stories archived from 2006, see Paleontology News 2006
For stories archived from 2005, see Paleontology News 2005
For stories archived from 2004, see Paleontology News 2004
For stories archived from 2003, see Paleontology News 2003
For stories archived from 2002, see Paleontology News 2002
For stories archived from 2001, see Paleontology News 2001
For stories archived from 2000, see Paleontology News 2000
For stories archived from 1999, see Paleontology News 1999
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