AtlasObscura has a fascinating story about a recent Roman villa discovered hiding under a British backyard.  The villa dates back to 175 to 220 C.E.  And, it probably still stood up to around 1400 years ago.  The villa was probably 3 stories tall and had 20 or more rooms. Sometimes there really is a secret world hiding in the backyard, just underneath the ground. In Wiltshire, in the south of England, one family decided to install some electric cables in the ground to light their converted barn. Just 18 inches under the soil, their work crew found mosaic stones in…

There’s a new myFOSSIL Project Newsletter for March 2016.  You can download it from here. Highlights:

A computed tomography image reveals the 305-million-year-old arachnid that is almost, but not quite, a spider.Credit: Garwood et al 2016/Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris livescience has a story about an “Almost Spider”.  The new animal, from France, was found locked in iron carbonate and hails from about 305 million years ago (Carboniferous Period).  It has been named Idmonarachne brasieri.  The name comes from the Greek mythological figure Idmon, father of Arachne, a weaver who was turned into a spider by a jealous goddess. “It’s not quite a spider, but it’s very close to being one,” said study researcher Russell Garwood,…

A scientist performs an autopsy of the remains of a puppy, which died 12,460 years ago and was discovered in Russia’s northern Yakutia, at the North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk Phys.org has a story about frozen ice age puppies found in Russia.  The puppies were found in Yakutia and date to 12,460 year before present.  The first puppy was found in 2011.  The second was found last year just a small distance away. The hunters searching for mammoth tusks were drawn to the steep riverbank by a deposit of ancient bones. To their astonishment, they discovered an Ice Age puppy’s snout…

Visitors passing by the skeletons of dinosaurs in the Humboldt Museum fur Naturkunde in Berlin, Germany. Photograph by VPC Photo, Alamy   Laelaps has an interesting post about the discovery of new dinosaur species over on the Phenomena blog at National Geographic.  We don’t know how many different dinosaur species existed during the reign of non-avian dinosaurs from about 235 million years ago to the mass extinction some 65 million years ago.  New dinosaurs are being described all the time, at a rate of about one every 2 weeks.  The latest was a new tiny, tyrannosaur from Uzbekistan was introduced…

Tyrannosaurs Rex fossil cast at the Royal Tyrell Museum (Pierre Camateros, cc-by-sa-3.0) CBC Radio’s Quicks & Quarks has a segment on the first pregnant Tyrannosaurus rex.  Dr. Mary Higby Schweitzer, a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, has confirmed that a 68 million year old T-rex, found in 2005, is, in fact, female and pregnant.  The paper appeared in Nature Scientific Reports. She and her team found medullary bone tissue in the dinosaur’s femur. Medullary bone is found in modern female birds that are in the process of preparing to lay eggs. It is…