Palaeontology
edyong | November 25, 2008
Animal fossils are usually the remains of hard structures - bones and shells that have been petrified through enormous pressures acting over millions of years. But not all of them had such hard beginnings. Some Chinese fossils were once the embryos of animals that lived in the early Cambrian period, some 550 million years ago. Despite having the consistency and strength of jelly, the embryos have been exceptionally well preserved and the structure of their individual cells, and even the compartments within them, have been conserved in all their beautiful, minute detail.
They are a boon to…
edyong | November 19, 2008About 18,545 years ago, give or take a few decades, a woolly mammoth died. Succumbing to causes unknown, the creature was buried in Siberian snow. Many other mammoths must have met similar fates but this one, which we now know as M4, is special. Almost 20 millennia later, its beautifully preserved remains were unearthed by scientists who have revealed both its body and its genetic code. For the first time, the genome of an extinct species has been sequenced almost to completion.
Webb Miller from Pennsylvania State University together with a large team of American and Russian scientists has…
edyong | October 8, 2008Many of us believe dinosaurs to be extinct but in truth, they surround us every day. All the world's birds, from the pigeons of our cities to the gulls of our seasides, are descended from dinosaurs, and modern science now classifies the birds with their long-dead kin. The gulf between dinosaurs and modern birds may seem huge, but the discovery of several feathered dinosaurs are seriously blurring the line between the two. And now, new research on the feathered dinosaur Microraptor reveals that birds may have evolved from dinosaur ancestors that flew not on two wings, but on four.
The link…
edyong | September 11, 2008Some 230 million years ago, giant reptiles walked the Earth. Some were large and fearsome predators; others were nimble and fleet-footed runners; and yet others were heavily armoured with bony plates running down their backs. Their bodies had evolved into an extraordinary range of shapes and sizes and they had done so at a breakneck pace. They were truly some of the most impressive animals of their time. They were the crurotarsans.
Wait... the who and what now? Chances are you've never heard of the crurotarsans and you were expecting that other, more famous group of giant reptiles - the…
edyong | August 6, 2008A good defence was a vital part of life in the Cretaceous. Plant-eaters needed effective ways of warding off the crushing jaws of Tyrannosaurus and its kin. Some species like Triceratops and Ankylosaurus had fairly obvious protective equipment, including horns, frills and armoured plates. But others lacked defensive armaments, and had to fend off predators through subtler means.
Take Hypacrosaurus. It was one of the duck-billed dinosaurs known as hadrosaurs, and like most other members of the group, its soft body lacked any obvious protection. Its main advantage was size; a fully-grown adult…
edyong | August 5, 2008Thanks to Hollywood, the jaws of the great white shark may be the most famous in the animal kingdom. But despite its presence in film posters, the great white's toothy mouth has received very little experimental attention. Now, Stephen Wroe from the University of New South Wales has put the great white's skull through a digital crash-test, to work out just how powerful its bite was.
A medium-sized great white, 2.5m in length and weighing in at 240kg, could bite with a force of 0.3 tonnes. But the largest individuals can exert a massive 1.8 tonnes with their jaws, giving them one of the most…
edyong | June 7, 2008
Few creatures, living or dead, can capture our imaginations like dinosaurs. But those of us who were mesmerised by these creatures as children may find today's cast strange and unfamiliar. Our well-known mainstays like Tyrannosaurus have been joined by Hollywood-sponsored favourites like Velociraptor, while new names are cropping up at great pace. Clearly, many new species are waiting to join the ranks. The question is: how many?
According to a study from 2006, we have only scratched the surface of dinosaur diversity. With over 1300 new groups left to discover, fossil-hunters should be…
edyong | April 2, 2008Did our ancestors exterminate the woolly mammoth? Well, sort of. According to a new study, humans only delivered a killing blow to a species that had already been driven to the brink of extinction by changing climates. Corralled into a tiny range by habitat loss, the diminished mammoth population became particularly vulnerable to the spears of hunters. We just kicked them while they were down.
The woolly mammoth first walked the earth about 300,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. They were well adapted to survive in the dry and cold habitat known as the 'steppe-tundra'. Despite the…