When Argentinian geologist Federico Alvarez Hazer immigrated to Baltimore one year ago to live with his wife, he imagined that his days working on fossil dig sites close to home—as he had in South America's Patagonia region—were ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jul 13, 2023
0
182
For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making it difficult to classify. ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Apr 17, 2023
0
1943
In May and June of 2018, Australia's first near-complete skull of a sauropod—a group of long-tailed, long-necked, small-headed dinosaurs—was found on a sheep station northwest of Winton in Queensland.
Paleontology & Fossils
Apr 12, 2023
0
166
A curator gingerly fastens a pointy claw bone with a thin metal wire, completing perhaps the world's biggest construction kit—reassembling a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus-Rex called Trinity.
Paleontology & Fossils
Mar 29, 2023
0
174
Dinosaurs as big as buses or five-story buildings would not be possible if their bones were dense and heavy like ours. Like present-day birds, dinosaurs had hollow bones with inner structures known as air sacs, which made ...
Evolution
Mar 7, 2023
1
10242
Modern birds capable of flight all have a specialized wing structure called the propatagium without which they could not fly. The evolutionary origin of this structure has remained a mystery, but new research suggests it ...
Evolution
Feb 24, 2023
2
1140
Scratches on dinosaur teeth could reveal what they really ate. For the first time, dental microwear texture analysis (DMTA) has been used to infer the feeding habits of large theropods, including Allosaurus and T. rex.
Paleontology & Fossils
Dec 9, 2022
0
184
Paleontologists at the University of Tübingen's Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment have discovered a hitherto unknown genus and species of dinosaur. Tuebingosaurus maierfritzorum lived about 203 ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Sep 8, 2022
0
306
Paleontologists from Flinders University are using a micro-CT scanner and 3D printing to reconstruct a small dinosaur preserved as opal for more than 100 million years in white sandstone rocks.
Biotechnology
Aug 29, 2022
0
97
A giant crocodile-faced dinosaur, discovered on the Isle of Wight by one of Britain's best fossil hunters, was probably the largest predator ever to stalk Europe, scientists said on Thursday.
Paleontology & Fossils
Jun 11, 2022
0
74
Fossils (from Latin fossus, literally "having been dug up") are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous (fossil-containing) rock formations and sedimentary layers (strata) is known as the fossil record. The study of fossils across geological time, how they were formed, and the evolutionary relationships between taxa (phylogeny) are some of the most important functions of the science of paleontology. Such a preserved specimen is called a "fossil" if it is older than some minimum age, most often the arbitrary date of 10,000 years ago. Hence, fossils range in age from the youngest at the start of the Holocene Epoch to the oldest from the Archaean Eon several billion years old. The observations that certain fossils were associated with certain rock strata led early geologists to recognize a geological timescale in the 19th century. The development of radiometric dating techniques in the early 20th century allowed geologists to determine the numerical or "absolute" age of the various strata and thereby the included fossils.
Like extant organisms, fossils vary in size from microscopic, such as single bacterial cells only one micrometer in diameter, to gigantic, such as dinosaurs and trees many meters long and weighing many tons. A fossil normally preserves only a portion of the deceased organism, usually that portion that was partially mineralized during life, such as the bones and teeth of vertebrates, or the chitinous exoskeletons of invertebrates. Preservation of soft tissues is rare in the fossil record. Fossils may also consist of the marks left behind by the organism while it was alive, such as the footprint or feces (coprolites) of a reptile. These types of fossil are called trace fossils (or ichnofossils), as opposed to body fossils. Finally, past life leaves some markers that cannot be seen but can be detected in the form of biochemical signals; these are known as chemofossils or biomarkers.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
