Via FoodGawker: How to Make a Paleontology cupcake.   

Via ABC News: … A paleontologist who undertook a major excavation of ice age fossils of mammoths and mastodons in Colorado was named the next director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History on Thursday. Kirk Johnson, currently chief curator and vice president of research at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, will take command of one of the nation’s most visited museums in late October.  

Via NYTimes (hat tip Dave Carlson over at the Yahoo Discussion Group): … Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown archaic species of human, a cousin of the Neanderthals, may have lingered in Africa until perhaps 25,000 years ago, coexisting with the modern humans and on occasion interbreeding with them…. Interesting fact: Bernard Wood, mentioned in the article, is a friend and an associate of Becky Ackermann, daughter of the Rogers (ESCONI members).

From the Gemological Institute via Geology.com: An article in the Gemological Institute of America Insider newsletter tells how Vincent Pardieu, supervisor of field gemology for GIA, searches for gemstones in Afghanistan.

Over at the ESCONI Yahoo Group, Dave Carlson has put forward this post:  Does anyone know what fossils are found only in Illinois? I think that the Ordovician cystoid Lepadocystis decorus is one, and maybe some Mazon fossils would also qualify. Anybody know specifically which ones? Any others outside of Mazon?

Via CBC: Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan along with the Geological Survey of Canada have discovered the country’s 30th meteor impact crater — a 25-kilometre astrobleme created more than 100 million years ago in the Arctic. The pit-like hole created by the impact of a meteor is in the northwestern part of Victoria Island, and located between Nunavut and the Northwest Territories.    

Via Wall Street Journal – a nice graphic of mineral resources left to be found –  Mining companies estimate the Earth contains enough of certain minerals to last hundreds of years, and that available reserves will be better used thanks to techniques such as drilling deeper and mining in largely untapped places, such as Greenland, Mongolia and the Arctic. See available reserves and read about the minerals.

Enjoyable radio show you can still listen to online or via podcast –  On Point:  Life forms come and go on this planet. An amazing few have stuck around. Through meteorite strike, that wiped out the dinosaurs, and great extinction that killed almost everything. Through ice age and poisoned seas. The horseshoe crab has hung in there. The lungfish. The velvet worm. The gingko tree. An amazing few are supreme survivors. Mastodon, gone. Musk ox, still here. Platypus, still here. The greatest survivors have lasted billions of years. Humans? Not so much. Interview with Richard Fortey, a senior paleontologist at the…

Via New York Times…. … the British paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer — recently sat for an interview in New York that ranged across many recent developments: the evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens; the puzzling extinct species of little people nicknamed the hobbits; and the implications of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinkie finger found in a Siberian cave….

Via BBC from Science Magazine:  (hat tip – Floyd) Scientists studying how North America was first settled have found stone spearheads and darts in Oregon, US, that date back more than 13,000 years. The hunting implements, which are of the “Western Stemmed” tradition, are at least as old as the famous Clovis tools thought for a long time to belong to the continent’s earliest inhabitants. Precise carbon dating of dried human faeces discovered alongside the stone specimens tied down their antiquity.  

Via NYTimes: (hat tip Dave Carlson – ESCONI Yahoo Group): …Two of the hunter-gatherers in the study, the Hadza and Sandawe of Tanzania, speak click languages and carry ancient DNA lineages that trace to the earliest branchings of the human family tree. The third group is that of the forest-dwelling pygmies of Cameroon, who also have ancient lineages and unusual blood types…  

Via Geology.com: Fragments of the oldest pottery ever found were discovered in southern China. They are estimated to be 20,000 years old.  

Via PhyOrg: A new study indicates that mass extinctions affect the pace of evolution, not just in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, but for millions of years to follow. The study’s authors, University of Chicago’s Andrew Z. Krug and David Jablonski, will publish their findings in the August issue of the journal Geology.

Via PlanetSave: (hat tip Floyd) …The fossil of a previously unknown species of dinosaur has been discovered in the chalk beds of the Franconian Jura, and it shows very clear traces of fluffy plumage. The discovery brings up an interesting question, were all dinosaurs feathered? The new discovery is helping to change our perception of how predatory dinosaurs looked. Sciurumimus albersdoerferi is the first evidence that we have that theropod dinosaurs, which are not closely related to birds, were feathered. “This is a surprising find from the cradle of feathered dinosaur work, the very formation where the first feathered dinosaur…

Via Cardiff University: A 100 kilometre-wide crater has been found in Greenland, the result of a massive asteroid or comet impact a billion years before any other known collision on Earth. The spectacular craters on the Moon formed from impacts with asteroids and comets between 3 and 4 billion years ago. The early Earth, with its far greater gravitational mass, must have experienced even more collisions at this time – but the evidence has been eroded away or covered by younger rocks. The previously oldest known crater on Earth formed 2 billion years ago and the chances of finding an…

Via Forbes: … Lacovara is working with Dr. James Tangorra to bring paleontology up to date with 3-D printing. Using 3-D scans of fossils in the University’s collection, the team is able to produce 3-D printed replicas of the fossils. Those replicas can then be used in museums, as teaching aids, and a number of other uses. One particularly fascinating use? By pairing the 3-D printed fossils with robotics, scientists are able to test how dinosaurs actually…