The Daily Mail has a story of a 1000 year old Buddha statue that contains the mummified remains of a monk.  After a CT scan, it was determined that the mummy was missing all of his organs.  Other research found that the monk was the Buddhist master Liuquan.  The mummy will go on display in Budapest at the Hungarian Natural History Museum until May 2015.

UC Riverside is offering a $500 cash reward for the best explanation of fossil rings discovered in 492 million year old rocks from Wisconsin.  They are a bunch of paleontologists that want you to stretch your mind and come up with creative explanations for a real scientific problem.  So, think logically, what caused these intriguing ring-line structures on the seabed so many years ago?  Some of you may even have visited the quarry (in southwestern Wisconsin) where these fossils were found.  The contest runs through 4 P.M. Pacific Time on March 11.  You can find the rules here.  Get your…

Audubon poses a question, which is a riff on an age old question.   What came first, the chicken… oops!, dinosaur or the bird?  While the world outside paleontology (and biology) is still catching up, we all know the answer… the dinosaur!  Good summary of the history of the discoveries behind this knowledge.     

An illustration of a battle between Dimetrodon and Xenacanthus. CREDIT: Bob Bakker Since the 1970’s, paleontologists have argued about what Dimetrodon ate.  It seems that there just wasn’t enough meat for all the terrestrial predators.  Now, after 11 years of research Robert Bakker, of the Houston Museum of Natural History, thinks he knows what Dimetrodon ate.  They got their fill by eating freshwater sharks.  Check out the story over at livescience. During the early Permian, carnivores greatly outnumbered herbivores on land, so Dimetrodon filled its belly by hunting in shallow water. In the bone beds, Bakker and his collaborators uncovered…

Erich Parpart had seen nothing like it.  Was it a mammoth tusk?  A bone… maybe from a Tyrannosaurus rex?!  It was found before Christmas (2014) by the McHenry County Conservation District maintenance worker, while walking in a field in the 3000+ acre Kishwaukee Corridor near Marengo.  It has been identified as an incisor tooth from the lower jaw of a giant beaver.  The giant beaver, Castoroides ohioensis, went extinct around 13000 years ago.  The whole story is in the Northwest Herald. Parpart, a Wonder Lake resident who has been with the conservation district about a year, knew it wasn’t a cow…

A grass “spikelet” with fungus growing on it preserved in amber. (George Poinar) This week’s CBC Quirks & Quarks has a story about a grass “spikelet” encased in 100 million year old amber.  The amber found in Myanmar shows the top of the “spikelet” covered in a fungus known as ergot.  Due to their nature, fungi are very sparse in the fossil record. Because the ergot fungus of today is associated with the hallucinogen, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), Dr. George Poinar, a paleobiologist from Oregon State University, wondered if ingesting the ergot of yesteryear had any effect on dinosaurs of…

Detail of the upper part of Yuganotheca showing the agglutinated valves, and the horseshoe-shaped lophophore. Scale bar in millimeters. Image credit: Zhifei Zheng Part 2 of Episode 40 is up over at Palaeocast.  This time they discuss the fossil record of Brachiopods.  Their evolutionary path from the Cambrian until the present.  

Morning Glory thermal spring, in Yellowstone National Park (photo taken in August 2012). Credit: Joseph Shaw, Montana State University Science Friday’s Picture of the Week is of the Morning Glory thermal spring, in Yellowstone National Park.  It hasn’t always had the colors you see today.  Scientists used biological, chemical, and optical data to construct a mathematical model of how the spring has changed over time.  Tourists have been tossing coins, rocks, and other debris into it for decades.  That debris has partially blocked the underground heat source and lowered the temperature.  Now, the spring is home to photosynthetic microorganisms that probably…

A group of scientists from the Carnegie Institution have recovered proteins from a 15 million year of gastropod shell from the Calvert Cliffs of southern Maryland.  The team, which included John Nance, John Armstrong, George Cody, Marilyn Fogel, and Robert Hazen, collected fossil Ecphora shells from a popular collecting site along the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay.  The original paper was published in the inaugural issue of the Geochemical Perspectives Letters. Ecphora is known for an unusual reddish-brown shell color, making it one of the most distinctive North American mollusks of its era. This coloration is preserved in fossilized remains, unlike the…

Laughing Squid has a story about some amazing ancient Greek mosaics.  They were discovered in the Turkish city of Zeugma.  The artwork, which dates to the 2nd century BCE, is constructed of boldly colored glass.  Up until 2000, the ancient city was completely submerged underwater.  There are many areas of Zeugma, once home to about 80,000 people, left to excavate. From now on, we will work on restoration and conservation. We plan to establish a temporary roof for long-term protection. We estimate that the ancient city has 2,000-3,000 houses. Twenty-five of them remain under water. Excavations will be finished in…