Scientists say they've discovered the fossilized bones of a new type of pterosaur, a flying dinosaur-age reptile, which lived about 68 million years ago and had a wingspan of nearly 10 feet (3-meters).
The skeletal bits of the mid-sized pterosaur were found in Sebeş-Glod [approximatey 50 km. northwest of Sibiu] in Romania's Transylvanian Basin, famous for its rich array of Late Cretaceous fossils, including crocodylomorphs (ancient relatives of crocodiles), mammals, turtles and dinosaurs.
Scientists dubbed the new reptile Eurazhdarcho langendorfensis and say it belonged to a group of pterosaurs called the azhdarchids.
The 'Octopostes marinis' lived in vast colonies in swampy areas during the Carboniferous period [359 million years ago].
Little is known about 'Octopostes marinis' other than that fact that had a rather curious habit of growth, in vast rows of five columns and that reproduction was by a form of mitosis. This can be seen in the second row of these fossil remains, where the parents have begun to split. The third row shows five young juveniles that have broken away from their parent cells and begun life on their own, and of course the parent is now a new cell itself.
The individual cell was eight sided, hence the Latin name Octopodes [from the Greek 'οκτώ όψης'] and though very small, they occurred in such incredibly large numbers the Octopodes are thought to be a major contributor to the vast coal deposits around the world.
.
---------------------------
BTW, all of the above is pure fantasy. Time for me to reveal my 'Piltdown man' fossil fakery.
The 'Octopodes fossils' were found during a recent session with the Mandelbulb 3d software. Whereas most of the people who use Mandelbulb3d prefer to entertain situations and fantasies of future scenarios, I have found that this incedible fractal generation program is equally at ease in producing phenonmenal versions of the past, even if they are not necessarily true.
For a more detailed view of this 'fossil' image, visit my deviantArt page, and click on the enlargement button.
A 160-million-year-old rare fossil was unearthed by a five-year-old girl digging with a seaside spade in the UK.
Emily Baldry, from Chippenham, south-west England, dug up the 59kg Rieneckia odysseus fossil during her first organised dig last year at the Cotswold Water Park in Gloucestershire.
After painstakingly being restored, the fossil was put on display at the Gateway Information Centre, near Cirencester, yesterday.
"I have got lots of different fossils now, and can't wait to go fossil hunting again" said Emily, now aged six, according to the Cotswold Water Park - a wildlife haven and activity centre - website.
Her father Jon Baldry said, "It's great that Emily has got the fossil hunting bug, she has been very excited by all of this - let's hope her expectations have not been set too high after this amazing find!"
Dr Neville Hollingworth, who was leading the fossil hunt, said, "This ammonite is a very, very rare specimen, as only fragments of this type have been found previously in the UK.
Where would we be today if it weren't for the scientists of the past? From the miniature world of genetics to the vast expanse of space, review the greatest discoveries of all time across eight different scientific categories in this multi-part series. Join host Bill Nye as he recounts the 100 most important discoveries and explains how each one has had a hand in shaping the modern world. Watch his lively and dramatic accounts and learn how the great discoveries were made, how they impacted the development of scientific knowledge and how they touch our lives today. From the discovery of the dinosaur-killing KT asteroid to Carl Linnaeus' still-used life form classification system to the groundbreaking theories of Charles Darwin. Learn how intelligent life began on earth.
"Where did we come from? What makes us human? An explosion of recent discoveries sheds light on these questions, and NOVA's comprehensive, three-part special, "Becoming Human," examines what the latest scientific research reveals about our hominid relatives." Nova
Many decades ago, when I lived in the U.S., I always looked forward to the Nova programs for their extraordinary attention to detail, fine graphics and meticulous scientific research. This program tracing the evolution our early ancestors follows in that well established tradition.
"Understanding of humans' earliest past often comes from studying fossils. They tell us much of what we know about the people who lived before us. There is one thing fossils cannot tell us; at what point did we stop living day-to-day and start to think symbolically, to represent ideas about our environment and how we could change it? At a dig in South Africa the discovery of a small piece of ochre pigment, 70,000 years old, has raised some very interesting questions.
Anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged in Africa roughly 100,000 years ago. We know from fossil evidence that Homo sapiens replaced other hominids around them and moved out of Africa into Asia and the Middle East, reaching Europe 40,000 years ago.
Prof Richard Klein believes art is a landmark in human evolution. Unquestionable art that's widespread and common suggests you're dealing with people just like us. No other animals, after all, are able to define a painting as anything other than a collection of colours and shapes. This ability is unique to humans.
Other scientists agree. They believe art defines humans as behaviourally modern, and its beginning must coincide with the ability to speak and use language. If someone has the imagination to devise a shared way to describe their environment using art then it seems inconceivable that they could not possess language and speech. The search for the moment our ancestors became behaviourally just like us is also the hunt for the first evidence of art."
"Fossils of a meter-long (3.3-foot) prehistoric ocean predator have been found in southeastern Morocco.
The specimens include the largest yet of its kind and suggests the spiny, somewhat shrimplike beasts dominated pre-dinosaur seas for millions of years longer than thought.
Early offshoots of an evolutionary line that led to modern crustaceans, the so-called anomalocaridids looked sort of like modern shrimp or cuttlefish. But the fossil creatures had spiny limbs sprouting from their heads and circular, plated mouths, which opened and closed like the diaphragm of a camera.
Previous anomalocaridid fossils had shown the animals grew to perhaps 2 feet (0.6 meter) long, which already would have made them the largest animals of the Cambrian period (542 to 501 million years ago)—an evolutionarily explosive time, when invertebrate life evolved into many new varieties, such as sea lilies and worms."
Pterosaurs were flying reptiles of the clade or order Pterosauria. They existed from the late Triassic to the end of the Cretaceous Period (220 to 65.5 million years ago). [Pterodactylus is a genus of pterosaur, the first to be named and identified as a flying reptile.] Pterosaurs are the earliest vertebrates known to have evolved powered flight. Their wings were formed by a membrane of skin, muscle, and other tissues stretching from the legs to a dramatically lengthened fourth finger. Early species had long, fully-toothed jaws and long tails, while later forms had a highly reduced tail, and some lacked teeth. Many sported furry coats made up of hair-like filaments known as pycnofibres, which covered their bodies and parts of their wings. Pterosaurs spanned a wide range of adult sizes, from the very small Nemicolopterus to the largest known flying creatures of all time, including Quetzalcoatlus and Hatzegopteryx.
Pterosaurs are sometimes referred to in the popular media as dinosaurs, but this is incorrect. The term "dinosaur" is properly restricted to a certain group of terrestrial reptiles with a unique upright stance (superorder Dinosauria, which includes birds), and therefore excludes the pterosaurs, as well as the various groups of extinct marine reptiles, such as ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs.
"A well-preserved pterosaur with soft tissues reveals this dinosaur-age flying reptile had hair, claws and wings that were unlike anything seen on today's living animals, suggests a new paper.
Analysis of the remains, which date to around 140 to 130 million years ago, indicate pterosaurs were warm-blooded insect eaters that may have lived in trees and possessed sophisticated flying skills.
"Pterosaurs are unique in their bone construction and our study also shows that some of the soft tissues of these creatures differ from anything known today," lead author Alexander Kellner told Discovery News.
Kellner, a paleontologist at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, and colleagues made the determinations after studying the remains of the adult pterosaur Jeholopterus ningchengensis, found in Late Jurassic or Early Cretaceous layers of the Daohugou Bed in China.
Wing tissues show the pterosaur had a nearly three-foot wingspan with a complex flying membrane located between the animal's body and each of its large fingers. The membrane consisted of up to three layers containing structural fibers, with fibers in each layer oriented in a different direction, forming a reticular pattern. . . . . "
"Remarkable Creatures" by Tracy Chevalier is a tale of the remarkable fossils uncovered by a remarkable woman, Mary Anning, whose name is all but fogotten. Tracy Chevalier's novel depicts a time when people believed that God created human beings just a few thousand years ago. But instead of setting "Remarkable Creatures" during the contemporary U.S. 'bible belt', Chevalier digs back to the English town of Lyme Regis in the early 19th century. Two hundred miles north, a toddler named Charles Darwin would someday evolve into the world's most controversial scientist, but Mary Anning's finds, and conclusions, predated Darwin's brilliant theory about evolution.
Mary Anning, is an unjustly forgotten, real-life figure in 19th-century paleontology. She was the daughter of an amateur fossil hunter and cabinetmaker who died young. Mary helped support her impoverished family by combing the shore for "curies" -- curiosities or fossils that could be sold to gentleman hobbyists. With only a few years of training from her father, she developed an extraordinary ability to spot a variety of objects from what we now call the Jurassic period. Her ichthyosaur and plesiosaur fossils are still on display in the national museums of London and Paris. Indeed, the discoveries made by this self-taught young woman proved important to the work of later leading geologists throughout the world.
Chevalier paints the novel's scientific and theological implications in subtle hues, and they provide a surprising portrait of an era on the cusp of intellectual explosion, a revolution of the mind. Geologists are wrestling with the discovery that similar layers of rock have been observed around the world. And it quickly becomes impossible to believe that the bizarre skeletons that Mary unearths -- 18-foot-long monsters with paddles instead of legs -- are really crocodiles that migrated from England hundreds of years ago. Some of the novel's most interesting sections show her gently pushing against accepted wisdom, letting the physical evidence lead her toward heretical conclusions. "To appreciate what fossils are," Chevalier has her note, "requires a leap of imagination."
"The first full analysis of a 4.4-million-year-old early human paints a clearer picture of what the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees may have looked like, which is not, after all, that much like a chimp at all. The ancient Ardipithecus ramidus ("Ardi", as the most complete female specimen is known) is described in 11 research papers published online today in Science. The prodigious research effort combines Ardi's fossils with those from many other Ar. ramidus individuals—both male and female—found near the Awash River in the Afar Rift region of Ethiopia.
Ardipithecus ramidus, although likely millions of years more recent than the so-called missing link between chimpanzees and humans, represents "coming as close as we've ever come to that last common ancestor," Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, one of the studies' lead authors, said in a recorded interview for Science." ......
The VIDEO which accompanies the Science NOW article has a wealth of good information.
[And, as an aside,in the Scientific American article you really should note the comments posted by PUSH at 04:17 PM on 10/01/09, and again at 04:27. Cofirms my long held supposition that most 'creationists' are, by their own choice, ignorant and uneducated. In 14 lines 'PUSH' magaged to rack up at least 20 errors of spelling, grammar, and syntax. This type of stupid incoherence may be perfectly acceptable for Sunday morning at the local fundie gathering, but really stands out in Scientific American.]