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