Fossils

Construction of the missing link in the state's power transmission system has produced a startling discovery of a different sort: a cache of fossils from a prehistoric grassland so rife with wildlife that scientists have dubbed it California's ancient Serengeti.

Excavating in a coal mine in Colombia, paleontologists have discovered the fossil of the world's largest turtle, a 60-million-year-old specimen nearly 8 feet long -- the size of a Smart car. Thriving in a lake about 5 million years after the demise of the dinosaurs, the turtle was undoubtedly the largest predator in its environment, researchers say.

Armed with picks, shovels and hammers, they venture out to traverse dry, desert trails, seldom-used mountain paths and abandoned mine dumps in search of treasure. They spend hours, and often days, in their quest. And when their journeys are over, they return home with their prizes: rocks. Scouring dry lakes and dusty deserts for rocks may not seem like the most exciting way to spend a free afternoon, but for avid rock hounds, few activities can compare.

When it comes to dino outerwear, shag might be the new scales. Fossil evidence from a trio of 125-million-year-old dinosaurs that were relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex indicates the giant creatures wore primitive feathers. The three tyrannosauroids -- one adult and two juveniles -- belong to a newly described species discovered in northeastern China. The full-grown Yutyrannus huali weighed 3,000 pounds and stretched about 30 feet from nose to tail. The younger ones were still impressive at about 1,100 and 1,300 pounds.

The middle-aged woman and the young boy, perhaps her son or simply another member of her tribe, were out hunting on the African plains or maybe looking for water in the midst of a drought when they fell into a sinkhole, dying almost instantly. Shortly thereafter, a monsoon or a flood washed them into a deeper basin, where they were covered with mud and rapidly fossilized. In 2008, nearly 2 million years later, another boy, 9-year-old Matthew Berger, discovered part of their skeletons outside the Malapa cave north of Johannesburg, South Africa, a find that experts have dubbed one of the most important of recent times.

An international team of paleontologists has uncovered the earliest known multicellular fossils, pushing back the fossil record for such life forms to 2.1 billion years ago and suggesting that they lived 200 million years earlier than scientists had thought. Since most fossils in that period were microscopic and single-celled, finding fossils that stretched as long as 4.75 inches was "like ordering an hors d'oeuvre and some gigantic thick-crust pizza turning up," said Philip Donoghue, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, who co-wrote a commentary on the finding.

Re "Down to the Bone," Aug. 18: For many decades Orange County paleontologists and archeologists have spent countless hours recovering what amounts to one of the richest collections of fossils and ancient artifacts in the nation. It is very disturbing to hear that these collections are being stored away in some county warehouse. Like the counties of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego, it is time for the county of Orange to provide a centralized natural history museum that can catalog, store , study and display the ancient relics.

It happened more than a million years ago, but the fossilized evidence preserved the scene. A horse not much different from modern horses was enjoying a cool drink at a watering hole in what is now San Timoteo Canyon when a saber-toothed cat sneaked up and grabbed it by the haunch. After finishing its meal, the cat left the skeleton to be buried in mud from flash floods. That cat, or one very like it, eventually also ended up dead and its skeleton joined the horse's in the accumulating sediment.

Australia handed over to the Chinese government 10,000 fossils that had been illegally exported, including dinosaur eggs, ancient turtles and a saber-toothed cat, an official said. Australian police and customs officials netted representing an "extraordinary" range of pieces valued at $3.8 million, including early elephant and rhinoceros bones and rare fossils of fish and reptiles, Environment and Heritage Minister Ian Campbell said.

Fossilized imprints of raindrops that were sealed into stone 2.7 billion years ago indicate that Earth's early atmosphere could have been packed with greenhouse gases, according to new research that addresses a long-standing paradox of the planet's early history. About 2 billion years ago, the young sun was far less bright, emitting less than 85% of the light and heat it puts out today. With such weak sunlight, Earth should have remained frozen. But ancient water-damaged rocks and algae-like fossils show clear evidence that there was indeed liquid water in the distant past.

Last week, the Senate voted on a proposal by New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez to end some of the billions of dollars in handouts enjoyed by the fossil-fuel industry. The Repeal Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act was a curiously skimpy bill that targeted only oil companies, and just the five richest of them at that. Left out were coal and natural gas. Even so, the proposal didn't pass. But that hasn't stopped President Obama from calling for an end to oil subsidies at every stop on his early presidential-campaign-plus-fundraising blitz.

Fossilized imprints of raindrops that were sealed into stone 2.7 billion years ago indicate that Earth's early atmosphere could have been packed with greenhouse gases, according to new research that addresses a long-standing paradox of the planet's early history. About 2 billion years ago, the young sun was far less bright, emitting less than 85% of the light and heat it puts out today. With such weak sunlight, Earth should have remained frozen. But ancient water-damaged rocks and algae-like fossils show clear evidence that there was indeed liquid water in the distant past.

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly discovered fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have unearthed a rare, 3.4-million-year-old partial foot that resembles those belonging to Ardipithecus ramidus , a species thought to have roamed East Africa a million years before Lucy and other members of her species, Australopithecus afarensis . The findings, published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature, provide the first good evidence that another bipedal human relative was still climbing trees at the same time that Lucy and her kind had their feet planted on the ground.

California has a state bird, a state flower and even a state fossil — the saber-toothed cat. Joining the bunch could be an official state marine reptile. A bill introduced last week by Assemblyman Paul Fong (D-Cupertino) would name the endangered Pacific leatherback sea turtle to a growing list of symbols that includes the California quail, the gray whale, the California poppy and the garibaldi — the state marine fish. The leatherback, the world's largest sea turtle, would claim an entry in the law books right below — and not to be confused with — its relative the desert tortoise, a landlubber that has held the title of state reptile since 1972.

Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket. Clustered nearby are hangar-sized assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 acres of public land. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors -- each the size of a garage door -- are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

Renewable energy is surpassing fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments, shaking off setbacks from the financial crisis and an impasse at the United Nations global warming talks. Electricity from the wind, sun, waves and biomass drew $187 billion last year compared with $157 billion for natural gas, oil and coal, according to calculations by Bloomberg New Energy Finance using the latest data. Accelerating installations of solar- and wind-power plants led to lower equipment prices, making clean energy more competitive with coal.

For the crew from a small Bakersfield museum, the trip home from an auction house in Los Angeles was bittersweet. They had managed to retrieve some of the fossils that had been on display at the museum for years, but many others were left behind, out of reach forever. Their two SUVs were packed with what museum supporters could acquire for the $24,000 they'd raised: ancient whale vertebrae, a dolphin skull, teeth from an array of sharks and the four-tusked hippopotamus-like desmostylus ?

A pair of fossils from the world's oldest known hummingbird of a modern type, which flew more than 30 million years ago, have been found in Germany, upending the assumption that the birds lived only in the Americas, Science magazine reported. The extinct species was named Eurotrochilus inexpectatus, or "an unexpected European Trochilus," the classification of the current species. The birds, measuring about 1.6 inches long, had elongated, narrow beaks.

California is on track to meet an ambitious goal of putting solar panels on up to 3 million Golden State homes by 2016, according to a new report by an environmental group. The $3.3-billion initiative, which provides subsidies to homeowners, has spurred the installation of 800 megawatts of rooftop panels over the last five years. That's the energy equivalent of two gas-burning power plants. With the prices of photovoltaic panels plummeting, California's installations are expected to triple over the next five years, helping the state reach its goal of 3,000 megawatts of rooftop solar by 2016.

After examining the fossils of two hominids that lived nearly 2 million years ago, anthropologists said that the anatomical features of the adult female and young male strongly suggest they could be members of a species that was a direct ancestor of modern humans. In a series of reports published in Friday's edition of the journal Science, the researchers describe the Australopithecus sediba specimens as having a curious mix of primitive and modern features that could prompt experts to redraw the human family tree.