If mankind has existed on this earth for a million years, then where are all the bones?And where are all the trillions upon trillions of bones for all the animals and creatures that would have lived here all that time?The reality is that if you look at population growth figures and the number of fossils that are actually out there, then a lot of what we have been told does not make sense.Consider
Palaeontologists have discovered fossil remains in Scandinavia of parrots dating back 55 million years. Reported May 14 in the journal Palaeontology, the fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark. Parrots today live only in the tropics and southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the North, much earlier than had been tho
A 50-million-year-old fossilised spider has been brought back to life in stunning 3D by a scientist at The University of Manchester.In a paper published in the Zootaxa journal, Dr David Penney and co-authors from Ghent University in Belgium report on the use of a technique called ‘Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography’ (VHR-CT) to ‘digitally dissect’ tiny fossils and reveal the preservation of internal organs.Dr Penney, from The School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (SEAES), specialises in studying spiders trapped and preserved in amber tens of millions of years ago.The male spider studied in his latest paper is a new species named Cenotextricella simoni. It is around 53-million years old and was found preserved in amber.
No sex for 40 million years? No problem!In Asexual reproduction duplication of gene copies of the single-celled creatures — called bdelloid rotifers can become different over time. According to a molecular biologist at the University of Cambridge, “It is like having a bigger tool kit,You can do the same job, but better.”___________________________Some other researchers draw the attention to a translucent, waterborne creatures which can survive upto 40 million years without sexual relations. Tunnacliffe was astonished to notice that how the creatures survives in the pool's water without gene-swapping made possible by sexual reproduction.________________________________He also added in this context on tuesday that, “Sexual reproduction is supposed to be a good thing in evolution, So when you come across an organism like the bdelloid, which hasn’t engaged in sexual reproduction for tens of millions of years, you begin to question why sex is important?"An Online Guide
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">Appearing like the punchline to an evolutionary riddle, a new fossil snake with legs has emerged from 95 million year-old deposits near Jerusalem. Its sedimentary surroundings suggest a seafaring lifestyle for this ancient reptile, but its advanced anatomy could overturn a current theory about the marine origin of snakes.This intriguing new species, dubbed Haasiophis terrasanctus , is the second limbed snake to come from the site of Ein Yabrud, an ancient marine environment broadly similar to the still, coastal waters of today's Bahamian reef. The first such species, Pachyrhachis problematicus, plays a pivotal role in a scenario that places the ancestor of snakes in the sea.But a riddle remains: why do these two snake species have hind limbs? If legs were the norm for snake ancestors, it would make sense to see the species' advanced anatomy as only superficially similar to more modern snakes. On the other hand, the stubb
All of the lonely nights Waiting for you to come, longing to hold you tight I need you so desperately Waiting for you to come bringing your love to me [but] I'd wait a million years Walk a million miles, cry a million tears I'd swim the deepest sea Climb the highest hill, just to have you near me As love is reality When you are near to me, I am in ecstacy I'd swallow the pain and pride Baby, I just can't hide all that I feel inside [and] I'd wait a million years Walk a million miles, cry a million tears I'd swim the deepest sea Climb the highest hill, just to have you near me A million years, I would wait for you A million tears, baby I'd be true A million miles, I would follow you A million years, if you want me to Pacing the floor, detest Sweat pouring down my chest, still I can't love you less It's worth all the pain and pride Baby, I just can't hide all that I feel inside [and] I'd wait a million years Walk a million miles, cry a million tears I'd swim the deepest sea C
A bee trapped by a glob of sap inside a come-hither orchid up to 20 million years ago has rewritten the evolutionary tale of a flower with the most fanatical following of any plant in the world.
original article here.
This morning - and not for the first time - I held down a screaming, flailing Poo while her father plucked from her nose the most disgusting, enormous booger in all of Christendom.
He had to use my tweezers.
This is the kind of booger you could auction off on eBay. I'm not kidding. In fact, I may try to sell it to Chambana as a tourist attraction.
Never, not ever did I think I would spend an
Tiny amphibian was found completely preserved in amber!!!MEXICO CITY - A Mexican researcher announced the rare find of a tiny tree frog completely preserved in amber on Wednesday that he estimates lived about 25 million years ago. The chunk of amber containing the 0.4-inch frog was uncovered by a miner in southern Chiapas states in 2005 and was bought by a private collector, who lent it to scientists for study. Only a few preserved frogs have been found in chunks of amber — a stone formed by ancient tree sap — mostly in the Dominican Republic. Like those, the frog found in Chiapas was of the genus Craugastor, whose relatives still inhabit the region Biologist Gerardo Carbot of the Chiapas Natural History and Ecology Institute, who announced the discovery, said it was the first such frog found in amber in Mexico. Carbot said he would like to extract a sample from the frog's remains to see if they contain well-preserved DNA, in order to identify the frog's species. However, he e
From The New York Times: The first species to be erased from this planet's great and ancient Order of Cetaceans in modern times is not one of the charismatic sea mammals that have long been the focus of conservation campaigns, like the sperm whale or bottlenose dolphin.
It appears to be the baiji, a white, nearly blind denizen of the Yangtze River in China.
On Wednesday, an expedition in search of any baiji, run by Chinese biologists and baiji.org, a Swiss foundation, ended empty-handed after six weeks of patrolling its onetime waters in the middle and lower stretches of the river, the baiji's only known habitat.
The Yangtze, Asia's longest waterway and thought to be akin to the Amazon long ago in its biological richness, now has a dominant species: the 400 million (and counting) people busily plying its waters and industrializing its banks.
Continued at "20 Million Years and a Farewell" [Evolution]
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From The baiji.org Foundation:
Wuhan, 13 December 2006 - The Baiji Yangt
The largest climate change in central North America since the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, a temperature drop of nearly 15 degrees Fahrenheit, is documented within the fossilized teeth of horses and other plant-eating mammals, a new study reveals.[Image: Mesohippus]The overwhelming majority of previous climate-change studies on the 400,000-year transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene epochs, about 33.5 million years ago, focus on marine environments, but University of Florida vertebrate paleontologist Bruce MacFadden and his colleagues turned their attention to fossils from the Great Plains.The study were published online on February 7 in the journal Nature and appeared in the February 8 print edition."If a temperature change of this magnitude occurred today, Florida would have weather similar to Washington, D.C., or even farther north," said MacFadden, a curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History.The Eocene-to-Oligocene transition (or Eocene/Oligocene Boundary)
Anthropology and Primatology - Excerpts from the February 23, 2007 PLoS Genetics paper "Genomic Relationships and Speciation Times of Human, Chimpanzee, and Gorilla Inferred from a Coalescent Hidden Markov Model" (Adapted) by Asger Hobolth, Ole F. Christensen, Thomas Mailund, and Mikkel H. Schierup:[Related news story from Scientific American - "Humans, chimps split 4 million years ago: study": A new study, certain to be controversial, maintains that chimpanzees and humans split from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago - a much shorter time than current estimates of 5 million to 7 million years ago.]Author SummaryPrimate evolution is a central topic in biology and much information can be obtained from DNA sequence data. A key parameter is the time "when we became human," i.e., the time in the past when descendents of the human-chimp ancestor split into human and chimpanzee. Other important parameters are the time in the past when descendents of the human-chimp-gorilla ancestor s
