prehistoric

Thirty-five thousands years before the likes of Kraftwerk, Nena and Rammstein, the lands of Germany were resounding to a very different sort of musical sound - tunes emanating from flutes made of bird bones and ivory. These thin tubes have recently been uncovered by Nicholas Conard from the University of Tubingen and they're some of the oldest musical instruments ever discovered.  The ancient flutes hail from the Hohle Fels Cave in Germany's Ach Valley, a veritable treasure trove of prehistoric finds that have also yielded the oldest known figurative art. The flutes were found less than a…
As boneless, gelatinous bags, octopuses rarely find themselves preserved as fossils but just this week it was announced in the journal Palaeontology that three new 95,000,000 year old octopus fossils have been discovered. These are the oldest on record. So what does an octopus fossil look like? Apparently, like something your elementary school child would create in art class when asked to create an octopus fossil. The precursors to modern octopuses had fins that ran alongside their bodies but these fossils do not. "These are sensational fossils, extraordinarily well preserved' says Dirk…
Did 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…
Scientists in Madagascar recently discovered the remains of a giant prehistoric frog, a relative of today's horned toads, which blew away the previous record for the largest known frog, Bennicus Bleimanicus. Dubbed Beelzebufo, meaning "frog from hell," the Devil Frog had important differences from today's frogs. To begin with, it was freakin huge. Susan Evans, a researcher from the University College of London, explained that if it was anything like its closest living forebears, "it would have been quite mean." Considering the fact that it was "the size of a slightly squashed beach-ball,…
For years debate has raged amongst bat researchers as to whether or not bats were really just "flying rodents..." World of Darkness at the Bronx Zoo when he heard a mother tell her young children this totally incorrect animal fact. As bats were his favorite animal, he became angry and marched up to the mother and informed her that she was totally wrong, told her to "read the signs if she didn't know the facts" and then filled her in on a few million years of evolutionary history Does this limestone make me look fat? Anecdotal stories about Benny's long lost intellectually-promising…
Dr. Emily Rayfield, a researcher at the University of Bristol has pioneered methods using computer modeling to determine dinosaur physiology. Research by Dr. Rayfield just published in the Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontolology sheds new light on the feeding habits of Baryonyx, which had a body similar to meat eating dinosaurs but now appears to have been better adapted for eating fish. Fascinating footage of a Baryonyx skull spinning around in circles, apparently proving something important. Using a CT scan, Dr. Rayfield was able to determine that Baryonyx's skull bent and stretched more…
An artist's rendering of what Pseudotribos robustus or a weasel-possum-lizard, might have looked like 165 million years ago In the November 1st, issue of Nature, a joint American and Chinese research team announced the discovery of a long dead prehistoric mammal with an interesting set of chompers. Although the teeth were very similar in form to other teeth found at the time, they actually were arranged in a "grind-cut" pattern instead of the more common "cut-grind" pattern! Upon realizing what they were looking at, some of the female researchers fainted from embarrassment. These days,…
Reported last month in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a fascinating fossil was discovered in the Saar-Nahe Basin of Southwestern Germany (sounds more like somewhere in Middle-earth than Bavaria to us, but go figure). The fossil(s?) comprises a fish that was eaten by an amphibian which was eaten by a shark. It is being described as the oldest snapshot of the vertebrate food chain and represents, if nothing else, some good eatin'. In case you couldn't visualize it, this last graphic is an EXACT snapshot of what this prehistoric brunch orgy looked like... The shark lived in…
Although most humans probably do not lament the disappearance of dog-sized insects, a handful of scientists do. These scientists obviously don't watch the same movies we do. Recently, a group of researchers from Argonne National Laboratory's Advanced Photon Source along with some other researchers from less badass sounding institutions used advanced x-ray equipment to try to determine why giant insects don't roam the earth devouring amorous teenage couples today. X-ray imaging of beetles helps confirm that tracheal system design may limit size in insects.The answer lies in their primitive…
For over a century the nature of prototaxites has been a source of mystery and debate among scientists. Growing over 20 feet tall and a yard wide, the organism grew straight up like a tree trunk, but had no leaves or branches. Prototaxites fossils from between 420 and 350 million years ago have been found throughout the world. Speculation as to whether prototaxites was a lichen, algae or fungus has divided researchers since the first fossil was found over 100 years ago. After advanced chemical analysis, the verdict is finally in: prototaxites was a huge friggin fungus. University of Chicago…
This is exhibit is right up our alley. For the next few months, the Pittsburgh Museum of Natural History is displaying strange prehistoric critters as part of its "Bizarre Beasts" series. Descriptions provided by the Museum.Helicoprion A coil of teeth caps the lower jaw of a sculpture of a 13-foot (4-meter) whorl-tooth shark, or Helicoprion, a fish genus that lived about 250 million years ago. Artist Gary Staab depicts the animal's jaw as something of a spiral conveyor belt, in which new teeth would advance to replace old ones (concealed here by skin) . But the true arrangement and…