Palaeocast has an interesting episode on the Paleocene/Eocene Global Thermal Maximum.   This was a very warm period in earth’s history.  It happened around 56 million years ago. The Bighorn Basin in Wyoming has been an important area for research into terrestrial ecosystems for decades. The basin formed as part of the uprising of the Rocky Mountains in the west of North America, and sediment from the surrounding mountain ranges was transported into it for millions of years, building up a huge thickness that has fossils from all kinds of life on land preserved within it. Rocks from many different time…

The On The Rocks blog has an interesting post on strange trilobites.  Trilobites come in all shapes and sizes.  Many are “weird”, but probably not any weirder than what is found in the modern, natural world.  The discussion is on both natural deformities from when the animal was alive and deformities caused by the fossilization process.  There is even an example with a bit mark. Human society has always been intrigued by the physical abnormalities of their peers. In the nineteenth century, ‘freak shows’ were such an attraction that even the American Museum in New York had a permanent exhibition…

Here’s an interesting project on Kickstarter.  It consists of 5 accordion books covering the 280 million years of prehistoric life.  $25 for 1 book and a t-shirt or $50 for all 5 books.  It covers the Cambrian Explosion, the Permian Mass Extinction, the Devonian transition to land, and much more… Check it out! “The Paleozoic” is a series of five illustrated accordion books about the era before the dinosaurs. Starting from the Cambrian explosion to the Permian’s great dying, the books explain the major events and evolutionary milestones of each period in plain language. Illustrated and written over the course…

A T. rex tooth discovered by UW Burke Museum paleontologists in Montana.Tom Wolken/Burke Museum Science News has an interesting item about the discovery of a new Tyrannosaurus rex fossil.  The skeleton includes the skull, ribs, vertebrae, and parts of the jaw and pelvis.  It was discovered this summer by two University of Washington Burke Museum paleontology volunteers, Jason Love and Luke Tufts.  About 45 people contributed to the recovery, which took about a month to complete.  The animal was given the nickname “Tufts-Love Rex” after the discoverers.   It lived about 66.3 million years ago, which was very close to…

The NY Times has a story about the last Mammoths on a small island in the Bering Sea.  Using a variety of data, researchers, led by a team from Penn State University, have shown that the Woolly Mammoths on St. Paul Island went extinct about 5,600 years ago.  The cause seems to be due to a lack of fresh water. The study, led by scientists from Pennsylvania State University along with scientists from elsewhere in the United States and Canada, analyzed a variety of indicators to show that these woolly mammoths became extinct about 5,600 years ago. According to Russell…

National Geographic has an amazing story about the discovery of a 100 million year old bird wing preserved in Burmese amber.  The amber dates to the mid-Cretaceous.  There’s bone, soft tissue, and feathers and it’s very similar to modern birds.  The tiny pair of wings have been nicknamed “Angel”, because it was originally intended to be used in a pendant called “Angel’s Wings”.  A study of the mummified wings was published in the June 28th issue of Nature Communications. While the fact that many, if not nearly all, dinosaurs were feathered has been generally accepted since the 1990s, our knowledge…

GeologyPage has a story about why large dinosaurs were somewhat rare in the tropics.  There were small bodied meat-eaters, but the absence of large plant-eaters in the low-latitudes is one of the great, unanswered questions about the reign of the dinosaurs.  There may now be an answer.  Researchers from various institutions worked to create a detailed picture of the climate and ecology of 200 million years ago from the rocks and fossils of the Ghost Ranch in northern New Mexico.  This Late Triassic site was near the equator at that time. The new findings show that the tropical climate swung…

AtlasObscura has a post about the possible discovery of the tomb of Aristotle.  A group of archaeologists have been digging at a site in the ancient northern Greek city of Stageira, where Aristotle was born in 384 BCE.  He died 62 years later in Chalcis, which is about 50 miles north of Athens. The Greek newspaper Ekathimerini reported Thursday that the finding will be announced at a press conference, as a capstone to a Aristotle-themed conference in Thessaloniki. Ahead of the official announcement, the Greek Reporter has some more details on the tomb, saying that “literary sources” say that Aristotle’s…