Via Scientific American:  Mar 4, 2014 |By Ed Yong and Nature magazine  Larger than some bacteria, this virus — seen in a cross-section under a transmission electron microscope — was still able to infect amoebae despite having spent 30 millennia in a frozen state. Credit: Julia Bartoli & Chantal Abergel; Information Génomique et Structurale, CNRS-AMU In what seems like a plot straight out of a low-budget science-fiction film, scientists have revived a giant virus that was buried in Siberian ice for 30,000 years — and it is still infectious. Its targets, fortunately, are amoebae, but the researchers suggest that as Earth’s…

Via NYTimes: Bringing extinct animals back to life is really happening — and it’s going to be very, very cool. Unless it ends up being very, very bad.

Beautiful photographs

Via LiveScience: Scientists have found the exact source of Stonehenge’s smaller bluestones, new research suggests. The stones’ rock composition revealed they come from a nearby outcropping, located about 1.8 miles (3 kilometers) away from the site originally proposed as the source of such rocks nearly a century ago.

Via Reuters: Scientists using two different age-determining techniques have shown that a tiny zircon crystal found on a sheep ranch in western Australia is the oldest known piece of our planet, dating to 4.4 billion years ago

Pet Dinosaur Guide – fun  

Over on the ESCONI Facebook page, Donald Baumgartner, posted: New Fossil Archaeopteryx Discovered. See the story at http://ewilloughby.tumblr.com/post/77207050788/the-12th-archaeopteryx-discovered

We reported on the new Burgess shale discovery last week with a link to Scientific American, but over on the ESCONI Facebook site, Don Baumgartener posted a different link to the Royal Ontario Museum’s reporting on the discovery. The ROM site includes videos and photos like this:

Via Scientific American: A treasure trove of fossils chiseled out of a canyon in Canada’s Kootenay National Park rivals the famous Burgess Shale, the best record of early life on Earth, scientists say. “Once we started to break fresh rock, we realized we had discovered something incredibly special,” said Robert Gaines, a geologist at Pomona College in Pomona, Calif., and co-author of a new study announcing the find. “It was an extraordinary moment.”…

Via PhysOrg: …  researchers at MIT have determined that the end-Permian extinction occurred over 60,000 years, give or take 48,000 years—practically instantaneous, from a geologic perspective. The new timescale is based on more precise dating techniques, Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-02-end-permian-extinction-yearsmuch-faster-earlier.html#jCp

Via Scientific American: …Archaeologists working on the eastern coast of England have found a series of footprints that were made by human ancestors sometime between 780,000 and one million years ago. Pressed into ancient estuary mudflats now hard with age, these prints are the oldest ones known outside of Africa, where humanity got its start. Scientists discovered the prints early last May at the seaside site of Happisburgh in Norfolk. High seas had eroded the beach sand to reveal the ancient mudflats beneath. The team had to act quickly to record the footprint surface before it, too, eroded. They used…