Paleontology news

Paleontologists have discovered a new species of dinosaur with a softball-sized lump of solid bone on top of its skull, according to a paper published in the April issue of the journal Cretaceous Research. The species was a plant-eating dinosaur about as big as a medium-sized dog that lived 70 to 80 million years ago, said Nicholas Longrich of Yale University, lead author of the paper. The team discovered two skull fragments in Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas in 2008. They compared them to dozens of fossils from related species found in Canada and Montana before confirming that the fossils represented a new genus of pachycephalosaur, a group of bipedal, thick-skulled dinosaurs.

A new study led by Ohio University scientists suggests that early Native Americans left a bigger carbon footprint than previously thought, providing more evidence that humans impacted global climate long before the modern industrial era. Chemical analysis of a stalagmite found in the mountainous Buckeye Creek basin of West Virginia suggests that native people contributed a significant level of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere through land use practices. The early Native Americans burned trees to actively manage the forests to yield the nuts and fruit that were a large part of their diets.

The new T. rex has ferociously large teeth lining a single jaw. But its length is less than 2 inches. Tyrannobdella rex, which means tyrant leech king, is a new species of blood sucker that lives in the remote parts of the Upper Amazon. Although its regular host remains unknown, it was discovered three years ago in Perú when a 44.5 millimeter leech was plucked from the nose of a girl who had recently been bathing in a river. The new species, described in PLoS ONE, has led to revising the group of leeches that has a habit of feeding from body orifices of mammals. "Because of our analysis of morphology and DNA, we think that Tyrannobdella rex is most closely related to another leech that gets into the mouths of livestock in Mexico," says Anna Phillips, a graduate student affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History and the first author of the paper. "We think the leech could feed on aquatic mammals, from their noses and mouths for example, where they could stay for weeks at a time."

Egyptian archaeologists discovered an intricately carved plaster sarcophagus portraying a wide-eyed woman dressed in a tunic in a newly uncovered complex of tombs at a remote desert oasis, Egypt's antiquities department announced Monday.

Colorado researchers have discovered and partially mapped a major urban center once occupied by the Purépecha of Mexico, a little-known people who fought the Aztecs to a standstill and who controlled much of western Mexico until diseases brought by the Spanish decimated them.

Two partial skeletons have been discovered in the cave deposits in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site near Johannesburg, in the Republic of South Africa by members of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The human fossils, close to 2 million years old, have been classified as a new species: Australopithecus sediba. Australopithecus means "southern ape" and Sediba, taken from the local South African language seSotho means "natural spring, fountain or wellspring".

The hunter-gatherers who inhabited the southern coast of Scandinavia 4,000 years ago were lactose intolerant. This has been shown by a new study carried out by researchers at Uppsala University and Stockholm University. The study, which has been published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology, supports the researchers' earlier conclusion that today's Scandinavians are not descended from the Stone Age people in question but from a group that arrived later. "This group of hunter-gatherers differed significantly from modern Swedes in terms of the DNA sequence that we generally associate with a capacity to digest lactose into adulthood," says Anna Linderholm, formerly of the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University, presently at University College Cork, Ireland.

In the ruins of a city that was once Rome's neighbor, archaeologists last summer found a 1,000-pound lead coffin. Who or what is inside is still a mystery, said Nicola Terrenato, the University of Michigan professor of classical studies who leads the project---the largest American dig in Italy in the past 50 years.