SCIENCE
October 2, 2009 | Thomas H. Maugh II
A treasure trove of 4.4-million-year-old fossils from the Ethiopian desert is dramatically overturning widely held ideas about the early evolution of humans and how they came to walk upright, even as it paints a remarkably detailed picture of early life in Africa, researchers reported Thursday. The centerpiece of the diverse collection of primate, animal and plant fossils is the near-complete skeleton of a human ancestor that demonstrates our earliest forebears looked nothing like a chimpanzee or other large primate, as is now commonly believed.
SCIENCE
January 31, 2004 | From Times Staff and Wire Reports
Scientists revealed that a fossilized millipede found in Britain is the remains of the oldest known creature to have lived on land. The tiny fossil was found near Aberdeen in eastern Scotland and is about 420 million years old. It was found by Aberdeen bus driver and fossil hunter Mike Newman. The fossil, named Pneumodesmus newmani, was reported in the latest edition of the American Journal of Paleontology.
SCIENCE
December 2, 2002 | Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer
When the smuggled stone slab first surfaced at a Tucson mineral show, it seemed the likely key to a mystery of evolution. To the collector who paid $80,000 for it, the Chinese fossil had every appearance of a feathered dinosaur that flew like a modern bird. The purported missing link made headlines when National Geographic trumpeted the find in 1999, then caused red faces when it was revealed as a forgery a year later.
TRAVEL
October 19, 2008 | Hugo Martin, Times Staff Writer
The bluffs and hills on the outskirts of this mountain biking hub were as red as a sunburn and barren, save for a few juniper trees and clumps of rabbit brush. As I hiked up a gentle slope to a flat stretch of sandstone, I saw them -- bigger and more clearly defined than I had expected. Dinosaur tracks. I crouched by the gnarly three-toed prints and ran my fingers along the curve of the claw and pressed my palm inside the hubcap-size impression.
NEWS
May 25, 1990 | JAMES M. GOMEZ, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Flake by painstaking flake, the sloping skull of a long-extinct whale emerged from an eight-foot-long cocoon of sedimentary earth and plaster of Paris. "I don't want to chip any of the fragile bone away," said Marian Meyer quietly as she scraped at the partially exposed fossil that sat on a pallet in the back room of RMW Paleontologists, a small research company in a light-industrial complex on Via Fabricante in Mission Viejo.
SCIENCE
May 20, 2009 | Thomas H. Maugh II and Tina Susman
A 47-million-year-old primate fossil that is so complete scientists can even tell what the animal's last meal was promises to shed new light on the earliest stages of evolution of the lineage that eventually led to humans, researchers said Tuesday. The unprecedented fossil of a lemur-like creature that probably weighed no more than 2 pounds when it was fully grown is remarkable because it is the most complete primate specimen ever obtained.
SCIENCE
March 25, 2005 | Robert Lee Hotz, Times Staff Writer
In bone blasted from Montana sandstone, fossil hunters for the first time have discovered the microscopic soft tissue of a Tyrannosaurus rex, preserved almost unaltered inside a bone since the dinosaur died 70 million years ago, scientists announced Thursday.
SCIENCE
November 21, 2007 | Thomas H. Maugh II, Times Staff Writer
One of its claws might feed an entire family, but this sea creature would be more likely to eat the family. British researchers said Tuesday that they had discovered a foot-and-a-half-long fossilized claw of an ancient sea scorpion, a species that would have been 8 feet long, making it the largest arthropod ever discovered. "We knew the sea scorpions were among the largest creepy-crawlies ever, but we didn't realize just how big they could get," said paleontologist Simon J.
NATIONAL
June 28, 2007 | Tomas Alex Tizon, Times Staff Writer
Clyde Friend's life changed the moment his bulldozer hit the first tree on a hot summer afternoon in 2002 as he leveled a hill behind his workshop. Chips flew everywhere, a small explosion of brown and white shards. He hopped off the dozer to investigate. There, embedded in the hill, was a mostly intact fossilized tree trunk standing upright in solid rock. "Well, that's different," he recalls thinking.
SCIENCE
January 14, 2006 | From Reuters
The answer to a scientific whodunit has revealed a chilling fact: Some of our distant relatives were prey for birds. Scientists announced Thursday that they had definitive proof that the "Taung child," a 2-million-year-old hominid skull famed as one of the most dramatic human evolutionary finds, was killed and eaten by an eagle.