BBCearth has a cool page called The 25 Biggest Turning Points in Earth’s History.   The list includes events like the formation of the Earth, the great oxidation event, the “Cambrian Explosion”, and various mass extinction events like the “Great Dying” and extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.   It’s well done and includes estimates on when the events happened. There’s a bunch of good content over at BBCearth.  

Birds are the only surviving dinosaurs on our planet.  By 2010, only three bird species (chicken, turkey, and zebra finch) had had their genome sequenced.  The Avian Genomics Project selected 45 additional species for sequencing.  These new species represent all 32 neognath and two of the five palaeognath orders.  This allowed for a large-scale phylogenomics analysis to investigate the bird family tree, and applied comparative genomics methods to address various questions such as avian genome evolution, sex chromosome evolution, molecular basis of flight, loss of teeth, vocal learning, and endangered birds.  In addition, while consuming this large body of data, new…

Andy Farke has a nice article about open access science at opensouce.com.  His article lists the 36 (nearly 1 a week!) new dinosaurs described in 2014.  Of these 36, 17 were published in open access or free-to-read journals.  That’s not much change from 2013’s 38 new and 16 free to read.  It is, however, a better percentage.  We’ll leave it to the reader to check for statistical significance. PLOS ONE continues to dominate the world of open access dinosaur species—nine of those 17 were published there. I will be very interested to see if this trend continues into future years, particularly…

National Geographic has a story about the discovery of a Jurassic aged predator trap that is  finally heading into the lab for study.   The remains, probably a bed of quicksand, were discovered about 10 years ago in Utah.  After years of work, a group of paleontologists have finally gotten the huge block of stone and bones down off the mesa where it was discovered.  There’s an interesting video that shows how they got the chunk of sandstone onto the truck.  The fossils include a prey animal skeleton, an Iguanadon, along with up to 10 specimens of Utahraptor.  The preservation is…

Here’s a story about an enormous underwater fossil lemur graveyard.  There’s a video that shows the remains of 1000 year old skeletons. Anthropologists and paleontologists uncovered what could be the largest single collection of lemur remains ever found. The remains were hidden in a series of underwater caves in a remote desert region of Madagascar. Described as a “lemur graveyard,” the discovery of hundreds of potentially 1,000-year-old skeletons make it one of the most unique animal gravesites in the world. This discovery could be important for understanding animal and human ancestry, and result in a new era for underwater paleontology.  

A new study links the March 2014 earthquakes in Poland Township, OH to hydraulic fracturing.  The fracking activated a previously unknown fault.  The quake had a magnitude of 3.0.  The study was published online by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America (BSSA). In March 2014, a series of five recorded earthquakes, ranging from magnitude 2.1 to 3.0, occurred within one kilometer (0.6 miles) of a group of oil and gas wells operated by Hilcorp Energy, which was conducting active hydraulic fracturing operations at the time. Due to the proximity of a magnitude 3.0 event near a well, the Ohio…

Class is in session over at Coursera, they have a dinosaur class starting this week.   It’s Dino 101.  A good introduction to dinosaurs, how they lived, and the world they lived in.  Your friendly blogger took the class a few years ago.  It’s a good class with interesting content.  Professor Phil Currie is one of the instructors.   You may have heard him speak at a previous Paleofest in Rockford, IL.  

Interesting story over at ScienceDaily.  The oldest known horned dinosaur has been found in Montana. The limited fossil record for neoceratopsian–or horned dinosaurs–from the Early Cretaceous in North America restricts scientists’ ability to reconstruct the early evolution of this group. The authors of this study have discovered a dinosaur skull in Montana that represents the first horned dinosaur from the North American Early Cretaceous that they can identify to the species level. The authors named the dinosaur Aquilops americanus, which exhibits definitive neoceratopsian features and is closely related to similar species in Asia. The skull is comparatively small, measuring 84 mm…