Picture: Damir G. Martin The Siberian Times has a piece about Sibirosaurus.  The giant titanosaur was discovered in 2008 during an expedition on the banks of the Kiya River in the area of Shestakovo village, in the Kemerovo region. The discovery is still being described.  This is the first instance of a titanosaur in Russia.  The bones consist of a part of a shoulder blade, cervical vertebrae, and sacrum.  They will be exhibited permanently in Paleontological Museum of Tomsk State University. The experts believe another finding made at the same location in 1995, a dinosaur foot, could also belong to the same newly…

Reconstruction of Carnufex carolinensis (Jorge Gonzales) This week’s CBC Quicks & Quarks has a couple of segments on giant creatures from the past.  The first is about a super-sized salamander from the Triassic (about 230 million years ago) of Portugal.  The interview is with Dr. Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist from the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.  He describes a 2 meter long creature that spent most of it’s time in the water.  There is evidence that it came on land to feast on small dinosaurs and mammals that ventured too close to the water’s edge.  This…

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Popular Science (and others) has a story about some scientists that have successfully copied genes from a frozen woolly mammoth into the genome of the Asian elephant.  Asian elephants are their closest living relative.  This is a interesting step, even though researchers don’t expect clones any time soon.  The research is being done at Harvard University by a team that includes geneticist George Church. Using a DNA editing tool called CRISPR, the scientists spliced genes for the mammoths’ small ears, subcutaneous fat, and hair length and color into the DNA of elephant skin cells. The tissue cultures represent the first…

JOE TUCCIARRONE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARYCORBIS The crash of meteors on early Earth likely generated hydrogen cyanide, which could have kick-started the production of biomolecules needed to make the first cells. Science has a story about the origin of life on earth.  “How did life arise?”  It’s long been a question that has baffled both modern day scientists and our ancient brethren.  Now, we may have a few more pieces of the puzzle.  Some chemists from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom have reported that they have created nucleic acid precursors starting with just hydrogen cyanide (HCN), hydrogen sulfide (H2S),…

Ed Yong has an interesting story about Toxodon on the blog Phenomena over at National Geographic.  Seems the animal never really had a comfortable place in the tree of life.  But now, using molecular biology techniques on old bones, scientists were able to extract enough information from collagen molecules to place Toxodon near perissodactyls – odd-toed hoofed mammals like rhinos, tapirs, and horses. “Toxodon is perhaps one of the strangest animals ever discovered,” wrote Charles Darwin, a man who was no stranger to strangeness. He first encountered the creature in Uruguay on November 26th, 1834. “Having heard of some giant’s…

Moa Statues The Archaeology News Network has a piece about the discovery of Moa (Megalapteryx didinus) remains in an ancient oven.  The oven is thought to be at least 600 years old, which makes it one of the oldest archaeological sites in New Zealand.  Moas are extinct flightless birds that lived only in New Zealand.  They went extinct due to various reason all having to do with the settlement of New Zealand around 1300 CE.  The extinction took less that 100 years, but there is some speculation the a few Moas may have persisted in remote corners of the islands until…

Ordovician Weekly has a story about the Digital Atlas of Ordovician Life site.  The Ordovician Atlas has a massive amount of information about the life of the Cincinnati Arch.  All of the expected animals are there, Arthropoda, Brachiopoda, Bryozoa, Cnidaria, Echinodermata, Hemichordata, and Mollusca.  There are pictures for identification, notes on the geology of the area, geographic occurrence maps,  and (most important) links to places for collecting.  It looks like it’s part of a larger NSF project to document the history of life. Here is a paper that describes the site in detail.