Paleontology news

Evidence of sophisticated, human behavior has been discovered by Hebrew University of Jerusalem researchers as early as 750,000 years ago – some half a million years earlier than has previously been estimated by archaeologists. The discovery was made in the course of excavations at the prehistoric Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site, located along the Dead Sea rift in the southern Hula Valley of northern Israel, by a team from the Hebrew University Institute of Archaeology. Analysis of the spatial distribution of the findings there reveals a pattern of specific areas in which various activities were carried out. This kind of designation indicates a formalized conceptualization of living space, requiring social organization and communication between group members. Such organizational skills are thought to be unique to modern humans.

A group of University of Kansas researchers working with Chinese colleagues have discovered a venomous, birdlike raptor that thrived some 128 million years ago in China. This is the first report of venom in the lineage that leads to modern birds. "This thing is a venomous bird for all intents and purposes," said Larry Martin, KU professor and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Institute. "It was a real shock to us and we made a special trip to China to work on this."

Seas were nearly 10 metres higher than now in previous interglacial period.

A 40,000-year-old baby woolly mammoth specimen found on Russia's Yamal Peninsula is being insured for 1 million euros ($1.47 million) before going on an international museum tour, AlfaStrakhovanie Group said on Monday.

In 2006, a team of Spanish and American researchers found the fossil remains of a whale, 4.5 million years old, in Bonares, Huelva. Now they have published, for the first time, the results of the decay and fossilisation process that started with the death of the young cetacean, possibly a baleen whale from the Mysticeti group. This is not the first discovery of the partial fossil remains of a whale from the Lower Pliocene (five million years ago) in the Huelva Sands sedimentary formation, but it is the first time that the results of the processes of fossilisation and fossil deposition following the death of a whale have been published.

A University of Manchester scientist, working as part of an international team, has uncovered an unexpectedly rich trove of relicts from the ancient cosmos.

A rare primitive theropod, or a bipedal, primarily carnivorous dinosaur, is bringing clarity to the early evolution of the group that includes more recent relatives like T. rex and birds. Tawa hallae, uncovered in New Mexican sediments from the Upper Triassic, has evidence of an air sack system surrounding the neck and braincase found in birds today, making this characteristic a much more primitive trait than previously thought. But even more enlightening is that a comparison of T. hallae with other early theropods finds that there is a curious mix of early North and South American forms at the base of the carnivorous dinosaur tree. The new research, published in Science, redefines the early evolution of this group as waves of migration from the south rather than as separate and endemic fauna. "We would expect that all of the theropod dinosaurs found in the quarry were related to each other," says Sterling Nesbitt, until recently a graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History who is currently at University of Texas at Austin. "But they are not. T. hallae and two other carnivorous dinosaurs from North America each have their closest relatives in South America."

The restoration team working on an old Antarctic hut have discovered two blocks of well preserved Kiwi butter, believed to be the oldest in the world.

Ancient DNA retrieved from extinct horse species from around the world has challenged one of the textbook examples of evolution – the fossil record of the horse family Equidae over the past 55 million years. The study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, involved an international team of researchers and the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) based at the University of Adelaide.

Paleontologists, aided by amateur volunteers, have unearthed a previously unknown meat-eating dinosaur from a fossil bone bed in northern New Mexico, settling a debate about early dinosaur evolution, revealing a period of explosive diversification and hinting at how dinosaurs spread across the supercontinent Pangaea. A live embargoed webcast with the scientists will be held in advance of publication for credentialed reporters on Dec. 9. See details below.

Years of scientific debate over the extinction of ancient species in North America have yielded many theories. However, new findings from J. Tyler Faith, GW Ph.D. candidate in the hominid paleobiology doctoral program, and Todd Surovell, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, reveal that a mass extinction occurred in a geological instant.

A man’s skeleton found atop a stone slab at Copán, which was the capital of an ancient Maya state, contains clues to a colonial expansion that occurred more than 1,000 years before Spanish explorers reached the Americas.