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TOPIC: Ancient fossils


L

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End of civil war opens up Angolan 'Jurassic Park'
Angola is best known for oil and diamonds, but dinosaur hunters say the country holds a "museum in the ground" of rare fossils - some actually jutting from the earth - waiting to be discovered.

"Angola is the final frontier for palaeontology" - Louis Jacobs, of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, part of the PaleoAngola project which is hunting for dinosaur fossils.

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Palaeontologists have drawn with ink extracted from a preserved fossilised squid uncovered during a dig in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, BBC informs.
The fossil, thought to be 150 million years old, was found when a rock was cracked open, revealing the one-inch-long black ink sac. A picture of the creature and its Latin name was drawn using its ink.

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Efforts to preserve evolutionary history should focus on the most vulnerable lineages
Global calamities like the one that doomed most dinosaurs forever alter the varieties of life found on Earth, but new research by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago and elsewhere shows that it doesnt take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. An analysis of 200 million years of history for marine clams found that vulnerability to extinction runs in evolutionary families, even when the losses result from ongoing, background rates of extinction.


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DNA-like technique may help nab fossil thieves
Investigators have high hopes for a new tool that could help them catch up with poachers who steal dinosaur bones and other fossils from public lands.
Stolen dinosaur bones and other fossils snatched illegally from federally owned land often disappear into living rooms, lucrative underground markets or expensive private collections.

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Gettysburg storms expose more ancient bones
Waves of storms that have pummelled the area during the past several weeks have exposed more early dinosaur age bones at the only known fossil site that has ever been found within Gettysburg Borough.
Several slabs of dense sandstone containing the bones of a giant amphibian that lived about 215 million years ago in a large stream that ran through what would one day become Gettysburg were recovered last week, along with a four-inch jaw section.

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As remarkable fossils are unveiled and novel interpretations of existing data are proposed, palaeontologists face new challenging issues, such as establishing the speed and mode of character evolution, the timing of key events in vertebrate history, and the impact of extinct species on hypotheses of relationships.
An international team of 14 specialists (from Australia, England, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Morocco, and Slovak Republic) have now joined efforts to contribute state-of-the-art research on various groups of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic limbed vertebrates.

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Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed
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The World's Richest and Most Extensive Marine Bone Deposit
In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, California, shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground.
Yet, new research by a team of palaeontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the University of Utah paints a less catastrophic picture. Instead of a sudden die-off, the researchers say that the bone bed is a 700,000-year record of normal life and death, kept free of sediment by unusual climatic conditions between 15 million and 16 million years ago.
The team's interpretation of the fossils and the geology to establish the origins of the bone bed, the richest and most extensive marine deposit of bones in the world, are presented in the June 2009 issue of the journal Geology.

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Fossils
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A new method for analysing the interior of fossils has shown that millimetre-long mussel-like crustaceans called ostracods used giant sperm to mate.
Sperm of modern ostracods can reach 10 times their body length.
The technique, known as holotomography, imaged the large sperm pumps and seminal receptacles of well-preserved ostracod fossils found in Brazil.

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In a coastal bay fronting an ancient sea where Bakersfield now stands, the waters once swarmed with giant 40-foot sharks, ancestral seals larger than any known today, and the ancestors of countless other marine animals long extinct.
That was 15 million years ago, but evidence of their existence lies in a priceless layer of fossils where a team of scientists working from the University of California at Berkeley has discovered clues telling how that fantastic fossil-rich site known as Sharktooth Hill formed in the water and was exposed to the surface much, much later.

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Virtual fossils reveal how ancient creatures lived
Behind the war of words over the significance of Ida, the 47-million-year-old primate fossil unveiled last week, a quiet revolution in palaeontology is unfolding. Thanks to a souped-up version of a technique better known for its use in medical diagnostics, we are gaining unprecedented insights into the way prehistoric creatures lived, breathed and grew.
The technique is X-ray computed tomography (CT).

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