* Astronomy

They went drilling for oil in northern Alberta and instead dug up a one-of-a-kind, 96-million year-old fossilized fish small enough to fit in your palm, but big enough to yield clues on how sea critters migrated in the age of Tyrannosaurus rex.
But to fish palaeontologist Alison Murray, the Tycheroichthys dunvenganensis is also a big question mark.

"It's complete fossil, which means it must have been killed and buried very, very quickly," said Murray, who now researches at the University of Alberta. It wasn't scavenged or broken apart in wave action. It must have been some sort of sudden event that killed it and trapped it in mud."

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When we lose our milk teeth they are replaced by new permanent teeth growing out in exactly the same positions. This is an ancient part of our evolutionary heritage and an identifying characteristic of the largest living group of backboned animals. Now, an international team including two scientists from Uppsala University has uncovered ancient fossil fish jaws that cast light on the origin of this group and its unique dentition. Together with scientists from Spain, Germany and France, Professor Per Ahlberg and Assistant Professor Henning Blom at the Department of Physiology and Developmental Biology have been studying two of the earliest bony fishes found in Sweden and Germany, managing to show that they belong to the same group of vertebrates as ourselves, the Osteichthyes.

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A 400 million-year-old fossil of a coelacanth fin, the first finding of its kind, fills a shrinking evolutionary gap between fins and limbs. The fossil shows that the ancestral pattern of lobed fins closely resembles the pattern in the fins of primitive living ray-finned fishes, according to the scientists.

"This ends intense debate about the primitive pattern for lobed fins, which involves the ancestry of all limbs, including our own" - Michael Coates, Ph.D., associate professor of organismal biology and anatomy at Chicago.

The fossil fin comes from a coelacanth, a type of lobe-finned fish, and provides the only skeletal fin remains to date from the extinct relatives of today's living coelacanths. Scientists spotted the 10 centimetre-long specimen at Beartooth Butte in northern Wyoming and have dubbed the fish Shoshinia arctopteryx after the Shoshine people and the Shoshone National Forest. When alive, the fish would have been about 46 to 62 centimetres in length.
The finding, detailed in the July/August issue of the journal Evolution & Development, shows the arrangement of bones within the fossil fin match the fin patterns found in primitive, living ray-finned fishes, such as sturgeons, paddlefishes and sharks.
Surprisingly, however, the patterns don't match the lobe-finned fish's living relative. Until now, scientists had assumed the living coelacanths and their relatives, the lungfish, served as accurate models of their ancestors dating back hundreds of millions of years ago.

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A strange-looking creature that fishermen caught off the island of Zanzibar has been identified as a coelacanth, an ancient fish whose ancestors first swam in the planet's oceans more than 360 million years ago.
The fish, which weighs 27 kg and is 1.34 meters long, was caught off the tropical island's northern tip, according to researcher Nariman Jidawi of Zanzibar's Institute of Marine Science.
The coelacanth, a "living fossil" once thought to have gone extinct with the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, until one was caught off South Africa in 1938.