Paleontology news

Adventurers who conquered Mount Everest successfully launched a replica of an ancient Philippine boat Saturday that they will use to sail around Southeast Asia and possibly to Africa to promote Filipino pride and unity.

The replica of the balangay — a wooden-hulled boat used in the archipelago about 1,700 years ago — was built in 44 days by native Badjao boat-builders from the southernmost Philippine province of Tawi Tawi using traditional skills handed down through the generations.

About 300 spectators counted down to the launch, cheering and applauding as the bow hit the water in Manila Bay.

Jubail Muyong, a teacher who belongs to the Badjao seafaring tribe, said he and nine Badjao craftsmen were flown to Manila to construct the 50-foot (15-meter) boat according to ancient traditions. Not a single nail was used, he said.

Expedition leader Art Valdez said the boat was a symbol of what Filipinos can achieve.

"(Since) more than a thousand years ago, this is the first time that a boat of this kind appeared in these waters, built by our people," Valdez said. "The boat is a time capsule that carries the history of our people."

Valdez said the 20-member expedition includes five coast guard personnel who were the first Filipinos to reach Everest's summit.

The boat will leave Manila in mid-July after training at Sangley Point, a former U.S. naval base in Cavite province, he said.

The expedition is expected to make 75 port calls from the northern to southern Philippines in seven and a half months, covering a distance of more than 2,000 nautical miles (3,900 kilometers), he said.

The boat will then begin a yearlong voyage to other Southeast Asian countries before the group decides whether to continue to Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa, Valdez said.

Dr. Ted Esguerra, the group's medical officer, said the expedition will conduct medical missions in poor coastal communities during its stops. The group will also teach disaster preparedness, help protect endangered coral reefs, and plant mangrove trees to protect fragile marine life.

Valdez said coast guard and navy vessels will monitor their trip and come to their assistance if needed.

credited to msnbc.msn.com

Archaeologists have found a group of water wells in western Cyprus believed to be among the oldest in the world.

The skeleton of a young woman was among items found at the bottom of one shaft.

Radiocarbon dating indicates the wells are 9,000 to 10,500 years old, putting them in the Stone Age, the Cypriot Antiquities Department says.

A team from Edinburgh University has found six such wells, near the coastal town of Paphos. They are said to show the sophistication of early settlers.

According to Thomas Davis, director of the Nicosia-based Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, "the fact that they were using wells and that they tapped into the island's water table shows heightened appreciation for the environment".

The latest five-metre (16-foot) shaft to be discovered had small natural channels in the bedrock at the bottom, confirming it was a water well.

In addition to a poorly preserved young woman's skeleton the silted-up well contained animal bone fragments, worked flints and some stone jewellery.

The wells were unearthed by an excavator at a construction site.

They date from the time that permanent settlements first appeared in Cyprus, the Associated Press news agency reports.

credited to news.bbc.co.uk

Good old-fashioned detective work has turned up the first conclusive explanation for the origin of a massive bonebed in southern California, according to a new study led by a UBC paleontologist. The Sharktooth Hill bonebed is exposed over approximately 100 sq. kilometres of land, located at the southern end of the Central Valley of California. It is one of the largest concentrations of marine vertebrate fossils in the world, containing an average of 200 fossils per square-metre, including the skeletal remains of whales, seals, sea turtles, sharks and land mammals.

What caused the collection of millions of fossils in a layer of only 10 to 50 centimetres of sediment has puzzled scientists since the bonebed's discovery in the 1850s.

"Scientists have proposed two kinds of explanations based on the accumulation of fossils," says Nick Pyenson, a post-doctoral fellow in the UBC Dept. of Zoology. "One group of ideas suggests a catastrophic incident such as a volcano eruption, a toxic algal bloom or even 12 metre-long relatives of the great white shark. Another kind of explanation is that the bonebed simply formed over a long period of time."

Conducting the paleontological equivalent of crime scene investigations on the bonebed, its fossil specimens and the surrounding geological data, Pyenson and his colleagues Randall Irmis and Jere Lipps (Pyenson and Irmis were graduate students at the University of California at Berkeley at the time) were able to disprove the one-time catastrophe theory.

"Our evidence suggests that the bonebed formed over a 700,000 year time-span approximately 15 million years ago," says Pyenson. Details of the investigation are published in the June issue of the journal Geology.

The team, which included paleontologists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, examined the size, wear and abrasion of more than 3,000 specimens of bones and teeth at local museums and found only five indicating shark bites. A lack of volcanic sediments and presence of land mammal remains further support the deposit-over-time theory.

"The bonebed formed during the Middle Miocene, which coincides with a prolonged period of exceptionally warm global temperatures," says Pyenson. "The associated changes in sea levels played an important role in forming the Sharktooth Hill bonebed, which explain its marvelous richness and expanse.

"More importantly, we now have a better handle on the kinds of factors - both geologic and biologic - that bias our interpretation of this snapshot of the ocean life from the Middle Miocene," says Pyenson.

credited to esciencenews.com

The largest animals ever to have walked the face of the earth may not have been as big as previously thought, reveals a paper published June 21 in the Zoological Society of London’s Journal of Zoology.

Widely cited estimates for the mass of Apatosaurus louisae, one of the largest of the dinosaurs, may be double that of its actual mass (38 tonnes vs. 18 tonnes).

"Paleontologists have for 25 years used a published statistical model to estimate body weight of giant dinosaurs and other extraordinarily large animals in extinct lineages. By re-examining data in the original reference sample, we show that the statistical model is seriously flawed and that the giant dinosaurs probably were only about half as heavy as is generally believed" says Gary Packard from Colorado State University.

The new predictions have implications for numerous theories about the biology of dinosaurs, ranging from their energy metabolism to their food requirements and to their modes of locomotion.

credited to Wiley - Blackwell (2009, June 22). Dinosaurs May Have Been Smaller Than Previously Thought. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 25, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2009/06/090621195620.htm

Researchers from the Teruel-Dinópolis Joint Palaeontology Foundation have compared an Allosauroidea tooth found in deposits in Riodeva, Teruel, with other similar samples. The palaeontologists have concluded that this is the largest tooth of a carnivorous dinosaur to have been found to date in Spain.

"Given the great variations between the teeth of different kinds of allosauroids, it would be prudent for us to assign this fossil to an indeterminate Allosauroidea", Luis Alcalá, one of the researchers involved in the study to be published in the upcoming issue of Estudios Geológicos and managing director of the Teruel-Dinópolis Joint Palaeontology Foundation, tells SINC.

The tooth, found by local residents in Riodeva, Teruel, in the Villar del Arzobispo Formation, has been compared with other samples from the Allosauroidea group from the Iberian Peninsula – in particular with a large tooth from Portugal (measuring 12.7cm) and another belonging to an Allosauroidea indet in Spain, until now described as the largest in Spain at 8.27cm.

Working towards a complete faunal record of Riodeva

The palaeontologists say that "the presence of a large Allosauroidea is a great addition to the faunal record of the dinosaurs described in the Villar del Arzobispo Formation in Riodeva".

Plant-eating dinosaur groups (phytophages) discovered in the deposit to date have been identified as sauropods, stegosaurids and basal ornithopods (from tooth remains and a complete rear leg). "Now the carnivorous dinosaurs are also represented, at least by two medium-sized theropods and a large predator belonging to the Allosauroidea clade", adds Alcalá.

Carnivorous dinosaurs grew new teeth over their lifetimes, which increase the likelihood of finding them. In this case, the condition of the crown of the tooth found (without any reabsorption surfaces) indicates that it was not a discarded tooth. The palaeontologists hope to discover the remains of this large predator, which could have attacked Turiasaurus riodevensis, the 'European giant'.

credited to FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (2009, June 22). Largest Carnivorous Dinosaur Tooth Ever Found In Spain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 24, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/06/090622103904.htm

After the dinosaurs perished, life on Earth didn't take long to bounce back, a new study suggests. A newfound 60-million-year-old creature called Eritherium azzouzorum—the oldest known elephant ancestor—bolsters the case that whole new orders of mammals were already around less than 6 million years after global catastrophe ended the age of reptiles some 65.5 million years ago.

Elephant ancestors, he said, now join the likes of rodents and early primates as some of the first known mammals to walk the Earth during the Paleocene era, 65.5 to 55 million years ago.

Much of the story of the newly discovered creature, said Gheerbrant, of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, can be found in its teeth. Two of the creature's lower front teeth jut a fraction of an inch out from its jaw. No other fossils of the time have teeth like this.

"This is some kind of precursor of the tusk of the more modern [elephant]," Gheerbrant said.

Based on the skull fragments, Gheerbrant guessed that the proto-elephant was probably no more than 20 inches (50 centimeters), tip to tail—"something like a very large rabbit," size wise.

Because the find consists of skull and jaw fragments only, Gheerbrant said there's not enough evidence to know what it looked like—or whether it had anything resembling a trunk or elephantine ears.

Sixty million years ago, Africa was lush with vegetation and disconnected from the Eurasian continent to the north . The continent, Gheerbrant said, was an evolutionary hotbed.

The rise of elephant-like mammals hot on dinosaurs' heels suggests there are many more mammals from the period to be found, he said. More fossil hunts are needed, he added, to uncover how evolution put mammals center stage once the reptilian resource hogs had gone.

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

An artificial underground cave, the largest in Israel, has been exposed in the Jordan Valley in the course of a survey carried out by the University of Haifa’s Department of Archaeology. Prof. Adam Zertal, who headed the excavating team, reckons that this cave was originally a large quarry during the Roman and Byzantine era and was one of its kind. Various engravings were uncovered in the cave, including cross markings, and it is assumed that this could have been an early monastery. “It is probably the site of “Galgala” from the historical Madaba Map,” Prof. Zertal says.

As with other discoveries in the past, this exposure is shrouded in mystery. “When we arrived at the opening of the cave, two Bedouins approached and told us not to go in as the cave is bewitched and inhabited by wolves and hyenas,” Prof. Zertal relates. Upon entering, accompanied by his colleagues, he was surprised to find an impressive architectonic underground structure supported by 22 giant pillars. They discovered 31 cross markings on the pillars, an engraving resembling the zodiac symbol, Roman letters and an etching that looks like the Roman Legion’s pennant. The team also discovered recesses in the pillars, which would have been used for oil lamps, and holes to which animals that were hauling quarried stones out of the cave could have been tied.

The cave’s ceiling is some 3 meters high, but was originally probably about 4 meters high. According to Prof. Zertal, ceramics that were found and the engravings on the pillars date the cave to around 1-600 AD. “The cave’s primary use had been as a quarry, which functioned for about 400-500 years. But other findings definitely indicate that the place was also used for other purposes, such as a monastery and possibly as a hiding place,” Prof. Zertal explains.

The main question that arose upon discovering the cave was why a quarry was dug underground in the first place. “All of the quarries that we know are above ground. Digging down under the surface requires extreme efforts in hauling the heavy rocks up to the surface, and in this case the quarrying was immense. The question is, why?” For a possible answer to this mystery, Prof. Zertal points to the famous Madaba map. This is a Byzantine mosaic map that was found in Jordan and is the most ancient map of the Land of Israel. Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley are depicted with precision on the map, and a site called Galgala is depicted next to a Greek inscription that reads “Dodekaliton”, which translates as “Twelve Stones.” This place is marked at a distance from Jericho that matches this cave’s distance from the city. According to the map, there is a church next to Dodekaliton; there are two ancient churches located nearby the newly discovered cave. According to Prof. Zertal, until now it has been hypothesized that the meaning of “Twelve Stones” related to the biblical verses that describe the twelve stones that the Children of Israel place in Gilgal. However, it could be that the reference is a description of the quarry that was dug where the Byzantines identified the Gilgal. “During the Roman era, it was customary to construct temples of stones that were brought from holy places, and which were therefore also more valuable stones. If our assumption is correct, then the Byzantine identification of the place as the biblical Gilgal afforded the site its necessary reverence and that is also why they would have dug an underground quarry there,” Prof. Zertal concludes. “But” he adds, “much more research is needed.”

credited to University of Haifa

Indonesian scientists are reconstructing the largest, most complete skeleton of a prehistoric giant elephant ever found in the tropics, a finding that may offer new clues into the largely mysterious origins of its modern Asian cousin.

The prehistoric elephant is believed to have been submerged in quicksand shortly after dying on a riverbed in Java around 200,000 years ago. Its bones — almost perfectly preserved — were discovered by chance in March when an old sand quarry collapsed during monsoon rains.

The animal stood four meters (13-feet) tall, five meters (16-feet) long and weighed more than 10 tons — closer in size to the woolly mammoth of the same period than to the great Asian mammals now on Earth.

Animal fossils are rare in the humid, hot climate of the equator because decomposition occurs extremely quickly.

Following a monthlong excavation, a team of seven paleontologists from the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java, set the bones in plaster for the trip back to their office where they will be laboriously pieced back together.

"We believe from the shape of its teeth that it was a very primitive elephant," but little else has been verified, said paleontologist Fachroel Aziz, who is heading a 12-strong skeletal reconstruction team.

Scientists agree it is the first time an entire prehistoric elephant skeleton has been unearthed since vertebrate fossil findings began to be recorded in Indonesia in 1863.

"It is very uncommon to discover a fossil like this in a tropical region like Indonesia," said Edi Sunardi, an independent expert at Indonesia's Pajajaran University in Bandung, West Java. "It apparently was covered by volcanic sediment that protected it from high temperatures, erosion and decay."

The next challenge will be removing the delicate bones from their molds and joining them into a stable, upright structure, a process that experts said is already being hampered by a lack of funding, inadequate tools and poor expertise.

Indonesia, an emerging and impoverished democracy of 235 million people, cannot afford to allocate more than a token sum to its aging museums, even for projects that have the potential to advance knowledge about the origin of key native species.

Gert van den Berg, a researcher at Australia's Wollongong University who helped dig up the skeleton, said tests are under way to determine its precise age and species, and that they will help provide details "about when the modern elephants evolved into what they are now."

About 2,000 old elephant remains have been found across the island nation over the past 150 years, but never in such good condition, Aziz said.

"We want to exhibit it publicly because this is a spectacular discovery," he said.

credited to newsvine.com

Researchers at the University of Florida and the University of Winnipeg have developed the first detailed images of a primitive primate brain, unexpectedly revealing that cousins of our earliest ancestors relied on smell more than sight.

The skull belongs to a group of primitive primates known as Plesiadapiforms, which evolved in the 10 million years between the extinction of the dinosaurs and the first traceable ancestors of modern primates. The 1.5-inch-long skull was found fully intact, allowing researchers to make the first virtual mold of a primitive primate brain.

"Most explanations on the evolution of primate brains are based on data from living primates," said lead author Mary Silcox, an anthropologist at the University of Winnipeg and research associate at UF's Florida Museum of Natural History. "There have been all these inferences about what the brains of the earliest primates would look like, and it turns out that most of those inferences are wrong."

Researchers used CT scans to take more than 1,200 cross-sectional X-ray images of the skull, which were combined into a 3-D model of the brain.

"A large and complex brain has long been regarded as one of the major steps that sets primates apart from the rest of mammals," said Florida Museum vertebrate paleontologist and study co-author Jonathan Bloch. "At our very humble beginnings, we weren't so special. That happened over tens of millions of years."

The animal, Ignacius graybullianus, represents a side branch on the primate tree of life, Bloch said. "You can think of it as a cousin of the main line lineage that would have given rise ultimately to us."

In previous research, Bloch and Silcox established that Plesiadapiforms were transitional species. Ignacius was similar to modern primates in terms of its diet and tree-dwelling but did not leap from tree to tree like modern fast-moving primates.

In many ways, the early primate behaved like living primates but with a brain that was one-half to two-thirds the size of the smallest modern primates. This means that factors such as tree-dwelling and fruit-eating can be eliminated as potential causes for primates evolving larger brain sizes, Silcox said, because "the smaller brained Ignacius was already doing those things."

The mold suggests a "startling combination" of features in the early primate that requires a rethinking of primate brain evolution, said Florida State University anthropologist Dean Falk, who was not involved in the study.

"Hypotheses about early primate brain evolution often link keen smell with nocturnal insect-eating, and a more recently evolved increase in visual processing with fruit-eating in arboreal habitats," Falk said.

The move to larger brain size occurred during an evolutionary burst that happened 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. At that point, visual features in the brain became much more prominent while the olfactory bulbs became proportionately smaller.

More than likely, Bloch said, this change in brain structure and size was related to primates living in closed canopy forests that brought trees closer together and allowed for more leaping. But answering that will require the discovery and analysis of new fossils.

Changes in brain size and brain structure in the early stages of primate evolution have generated enormous debates for decades. But until now, fossil evidence has been lacking.

Many models of the ancestral primate brain are based on tree shrews, which come from southeast Asia and are distantly related to humans. But with some 70 million years of evolution between them and humans, "it turns out tree shrew brains are not a good model," Silcox said.

University of Florida (2009, June 23). 54-million-year-old Skull Reveals Early Evolution Of Primate Brains. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 23, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­/releases/2009/06/090622171359.htm

DNA analysis shows that Indonesian zebu cattle have a unique origin with banteng (Bos javanicus) as part of their ancestry. Throughout the world, cattle inhabit a range of climatically diverse environments: common taurine cattle, for example, are kept in temperate zones, zebus in hot, dry climates and yaks at the high altitudes of Tibet. A report published by the online, open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE shows that another bovine species, the banteng, also made a genetic contribution to the ancestry of Indonesian cattle.

The study, conducted by an international team of researchers, was led by Bambang Purwantara from the Bogor Agricultural University, Hans Lenstra and Ben Colenbrander from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Utrecht University, and Göran Andersson from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala.

Cattle from Bali were already known to be a domestic form of the banteng, a species which can remain very fertile in the tropical conditions it inhabits. On the sporadic occasions when a banteng mates with a zebu, the offspring are usually reproductively viable.

In the PLoS ONE study, DNA analysis now shows that many of the famous 'racing bulls' from Madura descended from banteng cows, while the ancient Galekan cattle on East Java originally emerged from crosses between zebu bulls and banteng cows. The DNA of zebus on Sumatra also carries clear traces of banteng DNA. Banteng cows have therefore played an important role in the genetic ancestry of many Indonesian cattle. This shows the ingenuity of local breeders, who have made the best use of the available genetic resources and accomplished an adaptation of the Indian zebu to Indonesian conditions.

The history and breeding of Indonesian cattle has resulted in a unique genetic resource that combines the general tolerance of zebu to tropical and dry climates with the adaptation of domestic banteng to Indonesian conditions and husbandry. The researchers report that the information in their study about the history and species composition could be of great use when making strategic choices regarding breed management and conservation. They also suggest that the adaptation of Indonesian cattle to different modes of management under tropical conditions may very well be exploited outside Indonesia, especially if the world's high temperature zones expand, as expected from current global climate trends.

credited to esciencenews.com

Size does matter, at least for the seed shrimp. The tiny creatures' giant sperm are an evolutionary strategy that stretches back at least a hundred million years, scientists discovered in a new study.

To find out whether giant sperm is an ancient adaptation, researchers x-rayed the innards of five well-preserved seed shrimp, or ostracods, from hundred-million-year-old sediment from Brazil. Although the giant sperm had rotted away, the scientists could still see the remains of perhaps the ultimate male organ: a sperm pump, used to push the giant sperm out of the body.

"Only [shrimp] that produce giant sperm have this organ," study co-author Robin Smith, of Lake Biwa Museum in Japan, said by email.

Furthermore, two female specimens also found in the sediment had huge reproductive cavities.

"These sperm receptacles only inflate when they carry sperm, meaning the [two] females must have mated only shortly before they died," said lead study author Renate Matzke-Karasz, of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

Why Giant Sperm?

The giant sperm could be the equivalent of a peacock's tail—a way of attracting females, researchers say.

Also, the large reproductive cells may "cork up" females, ensuring no other males have the opportunity to mate. Or perhaps the giant sperm are sources of nutrients for developing embryos, the researchers say.

If giant sperm is an effective adaptation, there ought to be other animals benefiting from it—and there are, the researchers note. Certain frogs, gastropods, and insects join seed shrimp in producing larger-than-life reproductive cells.

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

If confirmed, Psittacosaurus gobiensis ("parrot dinosaur of the Gobi") would be the world's first known nut-eating dinosaur.

Knowing what type of food a dinosaur ate is extremely rare, said study leader Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago.

"Basically this solves a bit of a riddle for this dinosaur," said Sereno, who is also a National Geographic explorer-in-residence.

"We've now come closer to why it looks like it does."

Shearing Jaws

The skull, found in the Gobi desert in Mongolia in 2001, once had giant jaw muscles attached to broad sheets of extremely rigid cheekbone, giving the animal a powerful bite, said Sereno, whose study on P. gobiensis appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Like a parrot, the dinosaur was able to move its jaws both vertically and horizontally, allowing it to "shear" tough plants.

Hans-Dieter Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., said scientists have wondered why such dinosaurs and their relatives, called psittacosaurs, had both robust jaws and so many stomach stones.

Usually animals that use stomach stones tend not to need tough beaks. For instance, chickens have puny beaks, relying on sand and gravel in their gizzards to grind down their unchewed food.

Sereno's "very compelling argument that the [new dinosaurs] were eating unusually hard food makes good sense to me," Sues said.

Odd And Successful

Several species of psittacosaurs roamed Central Asia, where their fossils are now plentiful, scientists say.

The creatures often had odd features, such as elaborate horns and porcupine-like tail bristles.

Study leader Sereno said that the psittacosaurs' specialized diet might explain their success during that time.

That's because animals that take advantage of their environments—in this case, eating what few other animals could—have plentiful resources and are therefore more likely to branch into more species, added Sues of the natural history museum.

The new research, he said, "offers a very nice explanation about why these creatures are so diverse."

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

The fossil hand of a long-necked, ostrich-like dinosaur recently found in China may help solve the mystery of how bird wings evolved from dinosaur limbs, according to a new study.

The ancient digits belonged to a 159-million-year-old theropod dinosaur dubbed Limusaurus inextricabilis. Theropods are two-legged dinos thought to have given rise to modern birds.

Although it was a distant relative of Tyrannosaurus rex, the newfound dinosaur was a small herbivore, said study co-author James Clark, a biologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The animal was about 5.6 feet (1.7 meters) long and had relatively short, clawless forearms.

"Its head is [also] unusual because it doesn't have any teeth, so it would have had a beak of some sort, although not a sharp one," Clark said.

Primitive feathers may have covered the dinosaur's body, but there is no direct evidence for that, noted Clark, whose work was funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

L. inextricabilis appears to be an evolutionary snapshot of the transition between dinosaur fingers and the digits in modern bird wings, according to the study authors.

Theropod hands and bird wings each have three bones that appear to have evolved from the digits on a common five-fingered ancestor. But the dinosaurs were thought to have retained the first, second, and third fingers, while birds kept the second, third, and fourth.

"This didn't really add up, because all the other evidence is suggesting that birds are related to dinosaurs," Clark said.

L. inextricabilis, however, has four digits. The dinosaur's first finger is greatly reduced, while the second finger is enlarged.

"So here you have a form that's reduced the first finger, and it is right in this period of transition in the evolution of theropods," Clark said.

The find helps fill in what had been seen as a "chink" in the otherwise widely supported theory that birds descended from dinosaurs, said Hans Dieter Sues, a paleontologist at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the research.

"Having a fossil that shows that there are three digits plus this sort of little residual digit … is almost a perfect structural intermediate" linking theropods and birds, he said.

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

It was Darwinian theory that did away with the werewolf. For much of recorded history, humans have reserved their greatest fears for dog-human hybrids like the werewolf. These beasts were once thought to be real, hiding behind every tree waiting for the unsuspecting traveler.

Regal will present his thesis in July at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science in Leicester, UK. He will use period artwork to chart the ‘evolution’ of the werewolf into Bigfoot.

From the late 19th century onwards, stories of werewolf encounters tailed away significantly, says Regal. “The spread of the idea of evolution helped kill off the werewolf because a canid-human hybrid makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view,” he says. “The ape-human hybrid, however, is not only evolutionarily acceptable, it is the basis of human evolution.”

Today, in Darwin’s bicentenary year, werewolves have been relegated to films. When it comes to the actual monster scene, it’s Bigfoot that now dominates.

credited to sciencedaily.com

The 60,000-year-old Neanderthal is the first confirmed specimen to be found undersea anywhere in the world, the BBC reported Monday. The fossil was found by Luc Anthonis, a private collector from Belgium, among animal remains and stone artifacts recovered several miles off the coast of the Netherlands in 2001.

A chemical analysis revealed the humanoid probably was carnivorous, linking it to other Neanderthal specimens found, the British network said.

"Even with this rather limited fragment of skull, it is possible to securely identify this as Neanderthal," said Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Researchers note that sea levels are much higher now than they were during much of the past 500,000 years, meaning large swathes of the North Sea seabed were once dry land inhabited by many species of mammals.

credited to upi.com

Researchers have confirmed that the sculptures on the triangular gables of the Parthenon temple in Athens were originally brightly painted.

Conservation scientists at the British Museum in London used a non-invasive technique to reveal invisible traces of an ancient pigment known as Egyptian blue. The team says that this is the first definitive evidence that the two-metre-high sculptures were not pristine white, as they appear today, but were precisely painted — as most sculptures from antiquity once were.

The pigment, which was widely used until 800 AD, was identified on sculptures that formed parts of the decorated east and west ends of the Parthenon temple. Together with other parts of the temple, such as the frieze from within the building, they are sometimes collectively referred to as the Elgin marbles — removed by Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799–1803, and then transferred to the British Museum in 1816.

The scientists announced their findings just as the long-running feud over the ownership of the marbles has once again boiled over. The Acropolis Museum in Athens is due to be inaugurated on 20 June and was, in part, designed to house the marbles. Top delegates from the United Kingdom — including the Queen, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum — have declined to attend the opening.

The British Museum has also reiterated its standpoint on Greece's request to repatriate the marbles, saying that it will not return any of them except on a short-term loan — and then only if Greece acknowledges the British Museum's rightful ownership.

Antique paint

It has been known for more than two centuries that the Ancient Greeks and Romans painted their statues. That paint has almost completely disappeared over time, although tiny flecks can be found on most statues on close inspection. Unusually, no trace of paint has ever been found on the Parthenon sculptures, despite thorough analysis — including a full investigation by the renowned British physicist Michael Faraday in the 1830s.

Giovanni Verri, a physicist in the museum's department of conservation and scientific research, developed a technique to exploit the fact that Egyptian blue emits near-infrared radiation when excited by visible light. His portable detector comprises a light-emitting diode that beams red light onto the surface being examined, and a camera that can detect the infrared light emitted by the pigment particles.

The distribution of the pigment is also a key issue in proving that the sculptures were painted, says Verri. For example, the pigment found on the winged messenger goddess Iris traces just the belt restraining her billowing tunic (see picture, above), and nowhere else on the figure.

Greek conservators have recently observed greenish flecks on remnants of the Parthenon frieze that are in Athens, but have not reported analyses of them. "We informed our Greek colleagues of what we found," says Verri, "and they responded warmly, saying they are interested to examine these flecks themselves."

"I always believed the frieze must have been painted," adds Ian Jenkins, senior curator in the British Museum's Department of Greece and Rome. "This new method leaves no room for doubt."

Verri thinks these frieze flecks could also be Egyptian blue, and is keen to examine them with his portable detector. But he adds that as diplomatic tensions have flared up again, now might be an insensitive time to offer.

credited to nature.com

Given away by strange, crop circle-like formations seen from the air, a huge prehistoric ceremonial complex discovered in southern England has taken archaeologists by surprise. A thousand years older than nearby Stonehenge, the site includes the remains of wooden temples and two massive, 6,000-year-old tombs that are among "Britain's first architecture," according to archaeologist Helen Wickstead, leader of the Damerham Archaeology Project.

Archaeologist Joshua Pollard, who was not involved in the find, agreed. The discovery is "remarkable," he said, given the decades of intense archaeological attention to the greater Stonehenge region.

"I think everybody assumed such monument complexes were known about or had already been discovered," added Pollard, a co-leader of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, which is funded in part by the National Geographic Society.

Six-Thousand-Year-Old Tombs

At the 500-acre (200-hectare) site, outlines of the structures were spotted "etched" into farmland near the village of Damerham, some 15 miles (24 kilometers) from Stonehenge.

Discovered during a routine aerial survey by English Heritage, the U.K. government's historic-preservation agency, the "crop circles" are the results of buried archaeological structures interfering with plant growth. True crop circles are vast designs created by flattening crops.

The central features are two great tombs topped by massive mounds—made shorter by centuries of plowing—called long barrows. The larger of the two tombs is 70 meters (230 feet) long.

Estimated at 6,000 years old, based on the dates of similar tombs around the United Kingdom, the long barrows are also the oldest elements of the complex.

Such oblong burial mounds are very rare finds, and are the country's earliest known architectural form, Wickstead said. The last full-scale long barrow excavation was in the 1950s, she added.

The Damerham tombs have yet to be excavated, but experts say the long barrows likely contain chambers—probably carved into chalk bedrock and reinforced with wood—filled with human bones associated with ancestor worship.

During the late Stone Age, it's believed, people in the region left their dead in the open to be picked clean by birds and other animals.

Skulls and other bones of people who were for some reason deemed significant were later placed inside the burial mounds, Wickstead explained.

"These are bone houses, in a way," she said. "Instead of whole bodies, [the tombs contain] parts of ancestors."

Later Monuments, Long Occupation

Other finds suggest the site remained an important focus for prehistoric farming communities well into the Bronze Age (roughly 2000 to 700 B.C. in Britain).

Near the tombs are two large, round, ditch-encircled structures—the largest circular enclosure being about 190 feet (57 meters) wide.

Nonintrusive electromagnetic surveys show signs of postholes, suggesting rings of upright timber once stood within the circles—further evidence of the Damerham site's ceremonial or sacred role.

Pollard, of the University of Bristol, likened the features to smaller versions of Woodhenge, a timber-circle temple at the Stonehenge World Heritage site.

Damerham also includes a highly unusual, and so far baffling, U-shaped enclosure with postholes dated to the Bronze Age, project leader Wickstead said.

The circled outlines of 26 Bronze Age burial mounds also dot the site, which is littered with stone flint tools and shattered examples of the earliest known type of pottery in Britain.

Evidence of prehistoric agricultural fields suggest the area was at least partly cultivated by the time the Romans invaded Britain in the first century A.D., generally considered to be the end of the regions' prehistoric period.

Riches Beneath Ravaged Surface?

The actual barrows and mounds near Damerham have been diminished by centuries of plowing, but that, ironically, may make them much more valuable archaeologically, according to Pollard, of the University of Bristol.

The mounds would have been irresistible advertisements for tomb raiders, who in the 18th and 19th centuries targeted Bronze Age burials for their ornate grave goods.

And "even if the mounds are gone, you are still going to have primary burials [as opposed to those later added on top] which will have been dug into the chalk, so are going to survive," Pollard added.

The contents of the Stone Age long barrows should likewise have survived, he said. "I think there's good reason to assume you might have the main wooden mortuary chambers with burial deposits," he said.

Redrawing the Map

An administrative oversight may also be partly responsible for the site remaining hidden—and assumedly pristine, at least underground—project leader Wickstead said.

When prehistoric sites in the area were being mapped and documented in the 1890s, a county-border change placed Damerham within Hampshire rather than Stonehenge's Wiltshire, she said.

"Perhaps people in Hampshire thought [the monuments] were someone else's problem."

This lucky conjunction of plowing and politics obscured Damerham's prehistoric heritage until now.

The site shows that "a lot of the ceremonial activity isn't necessarily located in these big centers," such as Stonehenge, Pollard said. "But there are other locations where people are congregating and constructing ceremonial monuments."

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

The Americas' oldest known artist may have been an Ice Age hunter in what is now Florida, according to an anthropologist who has examined a 13,000-year-old bone etching.

The carved bone, which depicts a walking mammoth (detail of the bone at top), was found near Vero Beach in east-central Florida.

The now exclusive area once hosted giant beasts and nomadic bands of Ice Age hunters, said Barbara Purdy, a professor emerita at the University of Florida.

"I literally went on the assumption that [the carving] was a fake," said Purdy, who was later convinced of its authenticity after the bone had passed a barrage of tests by University of Florida forensic scientists.

The examinations revealed that the light etching is not recent, and that it was made a short time after the animal died, according to Purdy.

Scientists also determined the 15-inch-long (38-centimeter-long) bone fragment (pictured in full at bottom) belonged to one of three animals: a mammoth, a mastodon, or a giant sloth—all of which died out at the end of the last ice age, between about 12,000 to 10,000 years ago.

Discoverer and local fossil hunter James Kennedy only recently noticed the image after dusting off the bone, which had sat under his sink for a few years.

"I had no idea it was this big of a fuss. [When I heard] there was nothing else like it in the Western Hemisphere, that's when my heart kind of stopped."

Purdy, the anthropologist, said, "This is the first glimpse of real art in the Western Hemisphere, and I think that's our starting point for something that might be found in the future if we start looking closely at these old bones."

John Gifford, an underwater archaeologist at the University of Miami, has studied Ice Age peoples in Florida.

Gifford has not examined the newfound artifact, "so the only comment I can make is that I am very, very skeptical and look forward to reading the first article about this discovery in a journal [that has been reviewed by several scientists]," he said by email.

But it is "certainly possible" that such an artwork could be found, added Gifford, who has received funding from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.

Kennedy, the artwork's owner, said he's undecided whether to sell the bone or donate it to the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

But the University of Florida's Purdy said she hopes that the bone will end up in a museum.

"This goes beyond me and him," she said. "It belongs to the world."

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

An 11.9-million-year-old fossil ape species with an unusually flat, "surprisingly human" face has been found in Spain. The discovery suggests humans' ape ancestors split from primitive apes in Europe, not Africa—the so-called cradle of humanity—a new study says.

"With this fossil, our opinion is that the origin of our family very probably took place in the Mediterranean region," said study leader Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona.

"Surprisingly Human"

Unearthed at a fossil-rich site near Barcelona in 2004, the fragmented skull remains suggest a species with human-like facial features, Moyà-Solà said.

But a familiar face in and of itself doesn't mean the fossil "has any special specific relationship with modern hominds"—humans and the great apes—the paleontologist added.

Rather, the human-like face is evidence of great diversity among ape species in the Mediterranean region 12 million years ago, he said.

Missing Link?

Resembling both primitive ape species and our early ancestors, Anoiapithecus could be called a missing link.

The ape's wide nose and long palate, for example, resemble those of the ancient apes from which great apes and humans arose, the study says.

But Anoiapithecus' thickly enameled teeth and robust jaw are like those of primitive Kenyapithecus fossil apes, which lived in both Africa and Europe, according to the team.

Kenyapithecus species have been proposed as common ancestors of humans and great apes. Until now, however, there hasn't been a fossil linking Kenyapithecus to later apes thought to have evolved into more direct human ancestors, according to the study, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The 'folks' that migrated from Africa to the Mediterranean area were in fact completely primitive, without the [hominid] features that identify the members of our family," he said.

"The ancestors of gorillas, chimps, and humans then went back to Africa close to some nine million years ago."

There, they would give rise to the first humans, the thinking goes.

European Interlude

The new study isn't the first to hint at a European origin for hominids.

A similar theory has been advanced, for instance, based on 10- to 13-million-year-old fossils of the chimplike Dryopithecus group from France, Hungary, and Spain.

Anthropologist David Begun of the University of Toronto believes the evolution of African apes can be traced to Dryopithecus species that had migrated from Africa to Europe during the pre-Mediterranean Sea period.

"The new Spanish fossils do indeed support that hypothesis," said Begun, who was not involved in the new study.

However he "does not see any compelling evidence" linking Kenyapithecus with the newfound Spanish species.

"Frankly, [the new species] does not look like Kenyapithecus to me," he added.

Moyà-Solà, the study leader, doesn't rule out the possibility that each of the great ape species evolved independently from different Kenyapithecus species.

And it's possible that Africa could yet yield a species that, like the new Spanish ape, bridges the gap between early human ancestors and more primitive apes, he admitted.

"It's impossible to test our hypothesis [as of yet], because the fossil record in Africa from this period is very poor," Moyà-Solà said. "We need more and better fossils from Africa."

To that end, he said, the team's next major scientific stop will be somewhere south of the Mediterranean.

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

More than 100 feet deep in Lake Huron, on a wide stoney ridge that 9,000 years ago was a land bridge, University of Michigan researchers have found the first archeological evidence of human activity preserved beneath the Great Lakes.

"This is the first time we've identified structures like these on the lake bottom," said John O'Shea, curator of Great Lakes Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology and professor in the Department of Anthropology. "Scientifically, it's important because the entire ancient landscape has been preserved and has not been modified by farming, or modern development. That has implications for ecology, archaeology and environmental modeling."

A paper about the findings is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Co-authors are O'Shea and Guy Meadows, director of the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratories and a professor in the departments of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, and Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences.

O'Shea and Meadows found features that they believe to be hunting pits, camps, caribou drive lanes and stone piles used to attract the caribou to the drive lanes. Drive lanes are long rows of rocks used to channel caribou into ambushes. The 1,148-foot structure they believe is a drive lane closely resembles one on Victoria Island in the Canadian subarctic.

The hunting formations are on the 10-mile-wide Alpena-Amberley ridge that stretches more than 100 miles from Point Clark, Ontario to Presque Isle, Michigan. The ridge was a bridge between 10,000 and 7,500 years ago when water levels were much lower. Its surface is relatively unspoiled, unlike coastal areas where scientists believe other archeological sites exist. These coastal sites would now be deeply covered in sediment, so they're often considered lost forever.

Scientists have hypothesized for some time that the ridge might hold signs of ancient occupations. But they didn't know what signs to look for. O'Shea and Meadows zeroed in on caribou-hunting structures after considering the region's climate at the time, which would have been similar to the subarctic. Subarctic hunters are known to utilize caribou drive lanes.

The U-M researchers then narrowed down where to look for these structures by modeling the lake ridge as it would have been when it was dry. They worked with a Robert Reynolds a professor of computer scientist at Wayne State University to reconstruct the ancient environment and then simulate caribou migrations across the corridor. Based on this, they picked three spots to examine.

O'Shea and Meadows used U-M's new, cutting-edge survey vessel Blue Traveler, sonar equipment and underwater remote-operated vehicles with video cameras to survey these areas.

"The combination of these state-of-the art tools have made these underwater archeological investigations possible," Meadows said. "Without any one of these advanced tools, this discovery would not have happened."

Archaeologist will begin examining these areas this summer.

The Paleo-Indian and early Archaic periods are poorly known in the Great Lakes region because most of their sites are thought to have been lost beneath the lakes. Yet they are also times of major shifts in culture and the environment.

The Paleo-Indians were nomadic and pursued big game, O'Shea said. With the Archaic period, communities were more settled, with larger populations, a broad spectrum economy, and new long distance trade and ceremonial connections.

"Without the archeological sites from this intermediate time period, you can't tell how they got from point A to point B, or Paleo-Indian to Archaic," O'Shea said. "This is why the discovery of sites preserved beneath the lakes is so significant."

Perhaps more exciting than the hunting structures themselves is the hope they bring that intact settlements are preserved on the lake bottom. These settlements could contain organic artifacts that deteriorate in drier, acidic soils on land.

The research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

credited to sciencedaily.com

Under North America's second largest lake, robot-assisted archaeologists may have discovered prehistoric American camps and long "drive lanes" built to guide caribou to their deaths, a new study says (caribou pictures and facts). On what was once dry land, the structures likely date back 10,000 to 7,500 years. At the time, a vast land bridge divided what is now Lake Huron, researchers say (Lake Huron map).

Walk This Way, Caribou

One of the structures in the lake, which straddles Michigan and Ontario, Canada, appears to be a line of carefully placed rocks that stretches longer than a football field.

The line resembles lanes still used by Arctic caribou hunters, according to the study.

"An interesting behavioral trait of caribou is that they follow linear features," said University of Michigan archaeologist John O'Shea, who co-authored the new study, which will be published tomorrow in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The hunters recognized this, and the drive lanes were a way of casually suggesting, Why don't you walk this way?"

The drive lane may have been built by early North American settlers called Paleo-Americans—ancestors of later Native American tribes.

The stone line is relatively straight but curves inward at one point.

O'Shea thinks the curve may have been a hunting blind, where hunters waited to ambush animals as they approached.

In addition to a drive lane, the scientists think they may have spotted camp sights and stacked stones, or cairns, that prehistoric Americans used to attract the caribou's attention. Today Arctic hunters use "cairns to lead the caribou onto the drive lines," O'Shea explained.

The hunters "will sometimes attach ribbons to [cairns], and caribou are sufficiently curious that, when they see this, they want to come up and take a look."

Huron Mystery to Be Solved This Summer?

If the new finding is confirmed, it will be the first direct proof that Paleo-Americans living in the Great Lakes region hunted caribou on large scales like their counterparts farther north, said Michael Shott, a University of Akron anthropologist who was not involved in the study.

But Shott is not yet completely convinced the structures are human-made.

"The argument is a plausible one," he said. "But there may be natural processes that could produce both the large- and small-scale features."

Study co-author O'Shea agreed that processes such as glacial scraping could have produced the rocky lines.

The mystery, he said, could be resolved this summer, when scuba divers will examine the lake bottom.

credited to news.nationalgeographic.com

Rushing to salvage fossils from the Panama Canal earthworks, Aldo Rincon, paleontology intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, unearthed a set of fossil teeth. Bruce J. MacFadden, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida in Gainesville, describes the fossil as Anchitherium clarencei, a three-toed browsing horse, in the May 2009 issue of the Journal of Paleontology. By far the most complete fossil of a horse collected at the site in excavations spanning the last century, characteristics such as the shape of the teeth confirm the identity of two earlier finds and indicate that this horse was primarily a forest-dwelling browser living in the area between 15 and 18 million years ago. This evidence supports MacFadden's earlier proposal that the habitat was probably a mosaic of relatively dense forest and open woodlands. The presence of this browsing horse in Panama significantly extends the southern tip of its range from previous finds from roughly the same period in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota.

Expanding the Panama Canal waterway to make way for supersized ships is a dream come true for geologists and paleontologists, according to Carlos Jaramillo, senior scientist at the institute, who, in collaboration with the University of Florida and the Panama Canal Authority, has organized a team of researchers and students who move in following dynamite blasts to map and collect exposed fossils.

"This is one of very few places in the tropics where we have access to fresh outcrops before they are washed away by torrential rains or overgrown by vegetation, and we expect the fossils that we have been salvaging to resolve some major scientific mysteries," said Jaramillo. "What geological forces combined to create the Panama land bridge? Was the flora and fauna in Panama before the land bridge closed similar to that in North America, or did it include other elements?"

credited to esciencenews.com

Scientists from the University of California-Berkeley said the Sharktooth Hill site could be seen as the richest fossil site in the entire world -- a layer of fossils offers clues to animal species dating back to 15 million years ago, The San Francisco Chronicle said Saturday.

Scientists said the area was once home to ancient animal species that during a period of up to 700,000 years would die by the millions.

Evolutionary biologist Jere Lipps, UC Museum of Paleontology curator and co-author of a report on the Sharktooth Hill site, said the wealth of fossils at the now-inland California location makes it invaluable to the science world.

"It's as important to science and the public as the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and Colorado, and the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles," he told the Chronicle.

credited to upi.com

Researchers at an archeological site in northern Peru have made an unusually large discovery of nearly three dozen people sacrificed some 600 years ago by the Incan civilization.

The bodies, some of which show signs of having been cut along their necks and collarbones, were otherwise found in good condition, said Carlos Webster, who is leading excavations at the Chotuna-Chornancap camp.

The sprawling 235-acre (95-hectare) archeological site is 12 miles outside the coastal city of Chiclayo, near the ancient tomb of Sipan, which was one of the great finds of the last century. The sacrifices were made just decades before Spanish explorers arrived in what is now Peru.

Although archeologists regularly find evidence of human sacrifice from Incan and pre-Incan cultures, it is rare to find the remains of 33 people in one place, researchers said.

Scientists say human sacrifice was common within the Incan culture, which flourished immediately before the arrival of the Spanish in what is now parts of Peru, Chile and Ecuador between 1400 and the mid-1500s.

"Most of the remains belong to young women, around 15 years of age. One of them appears to have been pregnant because in her abdomen, the collarbone of a fetus, probably around 4 months, was found," Webster said of the latest find, made over the past year and a half.

"The majority (of the bodies) are in good condition -- skin tissues and hair have been preserved. They were found in a dry area more than 7 feet underground," he said.

Incan civilization is best known for its capital city, Machu Picchu, the ruins of which are Peru's top tourist destination and considered one of the new seven wonders of the world.

credited to reuters.com