Tag: evolution
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How did birds survive the dinosaur-killing asteroid?
Live Science has a story about the survival of the birds across the K-Pg boundary. A paper in the journal Science Advances looks at brain size of a fossil birds and theorizes that was a factor that helped them survive. When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago, it triggered a…
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Palaeocast Episode 130: Bats
Palaeocast podcast has a new episode. This one is about bats. After rodents, bats are the second largest group of mammals, representing a staggering 20% of all mammal species. They can be found all over the world, with the exception of cold climates, where they often play incredibly important ecological roles. Their ecologies (ways in…
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Strange Animals That Lived Before the Dinosaurs Reveal the Evolutionary Origin of Tusks
SciTechDaily has a story about animal tusks. Throughout history, many animals have sported tusks, from modern day elephants to the dicynodonts of the Permian. A new paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B looks at the evolutionary history of tusks. A wide variety of animals have tusks, from elephants and walruses to five-pound, guinea pig-looking critters…
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PBS Eons: How Ancient Whales May Have Changed the Deep Ocean
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about how whales changed the ocean. It looks like the evolution of ocean-going whales like Borealodon may have affected communities found in the deep ocean, like the ones found around geothermal vents. And it turns out that when a whale dies, that’s just the beginning…
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Newfound ‘chief dragon’ dinosaur species was actually the size of a chicken
LiveScience has an article about a newly discovered “dragon”. This animal’s name, Pendraig milnerae, means “chief dragon”, but in reality it was about the size of a chicken. It lived about 215 million years ago during the late Triassic Period in what is now modern day Wales and is one of the oldest known dinosaurs…
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PBS Eons: When Mammals Only Went Out At Night
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons over on Youtube. This one is about mammal evolution and our adaptations for being active at night. For decades, scientists believed dinosaurs were diurnal and tiny mammals were nocturnal. But as researchers have uncovered more mammalian fossils and studied the biology of different dinosaur species, they’ve found…
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PBS Eons: How a Supervolcano Ignited an Evolutionary Debate
PBS Eons has a new episode about the eruption of the supervolcano Toba. About 74,000 years ago, ancient humans, in Africa, suffered an evolutionary bottleneck. It seems Toba erupted at around the same time, was it the cause? The research is not clear. The Toba supervolcano was the biggest explosive eruption of the last 2.5…
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ESCONI September 2021 General Meeting – September 10th, 2021 at 8:00 PM via Zoom – “Exploring evolutionary patterns and processes in trilobites”
The speaker at our September 10th general meeting will be Dr. Mark Webster from the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. The topic will be Cambrian trilobites. Here’s a link to his page at the university: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/people/mark-webster/ Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/89231990376?pwd=RUVPTHlwTWNPRTJnV0ovckZZdk1QUT09 Meeting ID: 892 3199 0376Passcode: 916465 One tap mobile+13126266799,,89231990376#,,,,*916465# US…
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PBS Eons: The Creature That Stumped Darwin
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about Toxodon and its evolutionary history. Toxodon was one of the last members of a lineage that vanished 11,000 years ago after thriving in isolation for millions of years. And its fossils would inspire a revolutionary thinker to tackle a bigger mystery than Toxodon itself:…
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PBS Eons: How the Starfish got its Arms
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. This one is about echinoderm evolution… how the starfish got its arms. The story of how the starfish got its arms reminds us that even animals that might be familiar to us today can have incredibly deep histories – ones that stretch back almost half…
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PBS Eons: The Traits That Spawned the Age of Mammals
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about early mammals… when and how did mammals arise? Lots of the traits we think of as defining us as mammals show up pretty early, during the time of the dinosaurs. And, in some cases, they show up a lot earlier and in things that…
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Wadi al-Hitan (Valley of the Whales)
Atlas Obscura has a post and podcast about the Valley of the Whales. The Valley of the Whales is a place in Egypt that is just overflowing with whale bones. Its discovery in 1902 provided valuable information about the evolution of the whales. Few sites in the world speak of an evolutionary tale as rich…
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This ancient beetle is the first new species discovered in fossilized poop
Sciencemag,com has a story about a new beetle species, Triamyxa coprolithica, discovered in a coprolite. The fossil dates to about 230 million years ago. Coprolites, which are fossilized dung, can be used to study what plants were eaten by herbivores back when the dung was deposited. Previously, fossilized bone and phytoliths, which are microscopic silica…
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Paleonursery offers rare, detailed glimpse at life 518 million years ago
Phys.org has a story about a newly discovered fossil Lagerstatte. A paper published in Nature details the new deposit, which is located near Kunming, China. It dates to the middle Cambrian about 518 million years ago, which is same age as the Chengjiang locality. For reference, the Burgess Shale dates to about 508 million years…
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Phys.org: When tyrannosaurs dominated, medium-sized predators disappeared
Phys.org has a story about tyrannosaurs… seems they didn’t share much. A new study published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences found that tyrannosaur juveniles out competed medium sized carnivores wherever their adults rose to dominance. The research conducted by Thomas Holtz, a principal lecturer in the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology, verified…
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Fossil discovery deepens snakefly mystery
Phys.org has an interesting story about some unique insects. Snakeflies are slender, predatory insects that are native to the northern hemisphere and absent from tropical regions. It had been thought the animals needed cold winters to trigger development into adults. However, some new fossil discoveries from British Columbia and Washington state contradict that theory. These…
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PBS Eons: How Weasels Got Skinny
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about weasels and how they got their skinny body plan. Weasels have an extreme body plan that may push the boundaries of what’s metabolically possible. So when and how did this happen? Why’d the weasels get so skinny?
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Nature: Newly Identified Species of Saber-Toothed Cat Was So Big It Hunted Rhinos in America
Nature as an article about the identification of a new species of large saber-toothed cat. The animal, Machairodus lahayishupup, lived between 5 and 9 million years ago in North America. It’s larger than its ancient relative Smilodon, weighing in around 600 pounds or larger. The research has been published in the Journal of Mammalian Evolution. A…
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Throwback Thursday #57: Loch Ness Outdone: Rediscovery of the Coelacanth
This is Throwback Thursday #57. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc …), please send them to esconi.info@gmail.com. Thanks! Youtube has many good videos. Some are regular series. One of my favorites to watch during my workout…
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Video: ESCONI December 2020 General Meeting – “What Genetics Tells Us About the Peopling of the Americas”
The title for our Dec 4th program is “What Genetics Tells Us About the Peopling of the Americas” by Dr. Jennifer Raff, of the University of Kansas. Dr. Raff’s research includes ancient DNA, anthropological genetics, human evolution and population history, migration, bioarchaeology, and scientific literacy. You can find more about her on her page at…
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PBS Eons: How Humans Became (Mostly) Right-Handed
PBS Eons has a new episode over on Youtube. Why are the majority of humans right-handed? What evolutionary pressures led to it? No other placental mammal that we know of prefers one side of the body so consistently, not even our closest primate relatives. But being right-handed may have deep evolutionary roots in our…
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PBS Eons: The Genes We Lost Along the Way
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about fossil genes. Our DNA holds thousands of dead genes and we’ve only just begun to unravel their stories. But one thing is already clear: we’re not just defined by the genes that we’ve gained over the course of our evolution, but also by the…
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PBS Eons: When We First Talked
PBS Eons has a new episode which talks about talking. When did humans first speak? The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several…
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How did forelimb function change as vertebrates acquired limbs and moved onto land?
Phys.org has a piece about some new research that explored how early tetrapods used they newly acquired legs. It’s generally accepted that tetrapods migrated from water to land about 390 million years ago, during the Devonian Period. And, while the stages in the transition are understood, this research was about function…. How did the animals…
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PBS Eons: What Happened to the World’s Biggest Beaver?
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons. This one is about Casteroides, which lived in North America up to about 10,000 years ago. It’s important to us that you understand how big this beaver was. Just like modern beavers, it was semiaquatic — it lived both on the land and in the water. The…
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PBS Eons: The Triassic Reptile With “Two Faces”
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about a strange reptile called Adapodentatus “unusual teeth” from the Triassic Lagerstätte of Luoping in China. It’s one of the rare animals that changed its diet from meat to plants. Figuring out what this creature’s face actually looked like would take paleontologists years. But understanding…
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SciAm: Pterosaur Origins Flap into Focus
Scientific American has a piece on the origins of pterosaurs. A group of animals called lagerpetids are now thought to e the ancestors of pterosaurs. These animals lived between 237 and 201 million years ago during the Triassic Period. The details are in a paper in the journal Nature, which was published by Sterling Nesbitt,…
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PBS Eons: How Humans Lost Their Fur
There’s a new episode of PBS Eons on Youtube. This one is about humans and how we lost our fur. We’re the only primate without a coat of thick fur. It turns out that this small change in our appearance has had huge consequences for our ability to regulate our body temperature, and ultimately,…
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The Big Hill Lagerstätte
The University of Michigan has an interesting post about a new Lagerstatte, which was discovered in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan back in 2013. This fossil deposit dates to the Silurian Period about 430 million years ago. Over 40 species of animals have been discovered at the locality, including soft bodied animals like Jellyfish.…
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Growth Rings From Fossil Bones Reveals T. rex Had Huge Growth Spurts, but Other Dinosaurs Grew “Slow and Steady”
SciTechDaily has a story about Tyrannosaurs rex and how it grew. A new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, discusses diverse growth strategies in dinosaurs and how that relates to body size. The paper’s authors include Tom Cullen of the North Carolina Museum of Natural History and Peter Makovicky of…
