Devonian land plants caused ecological havoc (Credit: Walter Myers/SPL) The BBC Earth Blog has a story about the Devonian mass extinction, which is one of the least understood of the great extinction events in Earth’s history.  In new research, Matt Algeo has proposed that vascular land plants were the cause.  The vascular land plants evolved during the Devonian Period.  Their roots penetrated the ground, breaking up rocks.  This process would have released minerals and nutrients that eventually made it to the oceans.  This could have led to algal blooms, which in turn led to “anoxic dead zones”, as we see today with…

The Atlantic’s CITYLAB blog has a story about an interesting effort to map “The United States of Fossiliferousness”.  Cason Clagg is a fossil fanatic.  He’s a software developer and lives in Southern Oklahoma.  He wants to map where fossils are found.  He used data from the Paleobiology Database, which coincidently was inspired by David Raup’s work at the University of Chicago.   There are several versions of the map.  And, for those of you with an iphone, he plans to release an iphone app at some point in the future.  

A marrellomorph arthropod, probably belonging to the genus Furca. c. Credit: Peter Van Roy   ScienceDaily has a story about some spectacular new fossils from Morocco.  These fossils are from the lower Fezouata formation, which dates to Ordovician.  In the five years since its discovery, the Fezouata has revealed 160 new genera, with even more expected.  Many of these animals are holdovers from the Cambian and were thought to be extinct long before this younger time period, about 20 million years younger.   The original paper appeared in the Journal of the Geological  Society on July 8th. The Lower Fezouata formation has…

Credit: Katherine Taylor for Quanta Magazine Quanta Magazine has an interesting article on the evolution of birds.  It’s pretty commonly known that birds are dinosaurs, theropod dinosaurs.  That group includes some huge monsters like Tyrannosaurus rex.  Even the closest relatives to birds were quite large, at 100 to 500 pounds.  With the greater understanding of genetics and evo-devo, the story of how a line of dinosaurs shrank and evolved into birds is becoming much clearer. For decades, paleontologists’ only fossil link between birds and dinosaurs was archaeopteryx, a hybrid creature with feathered wings but with the teeth and long bony tail of…

Published on June 29th, 2015 | by Dave Marshall Palaeocast has a new episode.  The topic is Lobopodians.  This episode has two interviews.  Recall that earlier this week Nature had a paper that redescribed Halluciginia.  The first is with Dr. Martin Smith and is about that paper.  Halluciginia is one of the “weird wonders” of the Burgess Shale.  It was originally reconstructed upside down.  And now, the new paper has it flipped front to back.  The second interview is about an older and more armored lobopodian from the early Cambrian of the Xiaoshiba biota of China.  This new animal is called…

Reconstruction of Hallucigenia (Danielle Dufault) CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks has a segment about Hallucigenia.  Recall that Hallucigenia is the “weird” worm that was found in the Burgess Shale fossil deposit in British Columbia, CA.  It was first described by Simon Conway Morris.  He discovered it in 1979 when examining fossils originally found by Charles Doolittle Walcott in the early 1900s.  The new interpretation, by Dr. Martin Smith, a paleontologist in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues, includes a reconstruction of its head.  They used an electron microscope to get at the details. …

Mystacina tuberculata foraging on South Island, New Zealand.Credit: Rod Morris ScienceDaily has a piece about a huge ‘walking’ bat.  The new species, Mystacina miocenalis, lived about 16 million years ago.  It walked on four limbs and was about three times larger than the average modern bat.  Due to their size and living environments, bats are rare in the fossil record.  Until now, the oldest known bat of the genus Mystacina was 17,500 years old; it was also found on New Zealand.  The original paper appeared in PLOS One. The fossils were found near Central Otago on South Island, in sediment left…