Fossils

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The skull of an ice age giant ground sloth was recently uncovered at a construction site in Riverside County and could be headed for display at the San Bernardino County Museum. The bones dating back 1.8 million years were discovered Nov. 18 on the site of a future Southern California Edison substation as earthmovers flattened the land in a hilly area west of Beaumont, said Rick Greenwood, director of Edison's environment health and safety division. Work in the area was immediately halted.

Crocodiles have a nasty reputation, but the leathery, snappish critters have been around so long that they probably gave dinosaurs a fright too. On Thursday, University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno and his colleague at McGill University in Montreal, Hans Larsson, unveiled fossils of five ancient crocodile species -- nicknamed BoarCroc, RatCroc, DuckCroc, DogCroc and PancakeCroc -- that lived with and, in some cases, hunted and ate dinosaurs...

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.

Fossils recently found in Myanmar could prove that the common ancestors of humans, monkeys and apes evolved from primates in Asia, rather than Africa, researchers say. The pieces of 38-million-year-old jawbones and teeth found in 2005 show typical characteristics of primates, the researchers who found the fossils pointed out. Other scientists say it's too early to draw such conclusions. The findings were published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a London-based journal.

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.

The fossilized remains of two pregnant fish indicate that sex as we know it took place as much as 30 million years earlier than previously thought, researchers said Thursday in the journal Nature. Scientists studying 380-million-year-old fossils of the armored placoderm fish had thought the fish laid their eggs before fertilization. Then they realized the pelvis of male placoderms had a fin not seen on the female fish, and surmised it was probably used to grip its mate during fertilization, much as sharks do.

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.

Scientists have unearthed the remains of a large meat-eating dinosaur with a breathing apparatus much like that of a modern bird, fortifying the link between birds and dinosaurs and helping to explain the evolution of birds' unique system of breathing. Pulled from 85-million-year-old rock along the banks of Rio Colorado in Argentina's Mendoza province, the 33-foot-long, two-legged predator weighed as much as an elephant and probably had feathers, Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago reported Monday in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. Sereno thinks that instead of lungs that expand and contract, this beast had air sacs that worked like a bellows, blowing air into its stiff lungs, much like modern birds.

Australian scientists unveiled on Thursday the fossilized remains of the oldest vertebrate mother ever discovered, a 375-million-year-old placoderm fish with embryo and umbilical cord attached. The fossil, found in the Gogo area of northwest Australia, is proof that an ancient species had advanced reproductive biology, comparable to that of modern sharks and rays, said John Long, head of sciences at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. "It dawned on me after studying the specimen that this was the earliest evidence of vertebrates having sex by copulation," Long said.

A fossil found in Wyoming has apparently resolved a long-standing question about when bats gained their radarlike ability to navigate and locate airborne insects at night. The answer: after they started flying. The discovery revealed the most primitive bat known, from a previously unrecognized species that lived about 52 million years ago.