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Fossil and Archaeology News - December 2009 Archives
 | Now that an early carnivore fossil has been fully removed from its matrix (this after spending over a century on a shelf because of the associated crushed teeth), scientists are able to re-interpret the evolutionary tree of this group of mammals. ...> Full Article |
 | 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. ...> Full Article |
 | Museum Victoria palaeobiologist Dr. Erich Fitzgerald has made new groundbreaking discoveries into the origin of baleen whales, based on a 25-million-year-old fossil found near Torquay in Victoria. ...> Full Article |
 | 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. ...> Full Article |
 | Skull fragments of prehistoric koalas from the Riversleigh rainforests of millions of year ago suggest they shared the modern koala's "lazy" lifestyle and ability to produce loud "bellowing" calls to attract mates and provide warnings about predators.
However, the new findings published in the current issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology suggest that the two species of koalas from the Miocene did not share the uniquely specialized eucalyptus leaf diet of the modern koala.
...> Full Article |
 | The consumption of wild cereals among prehistoric hunters and gatherers appears to be far more ancient than previously thought, according to a University of Calgary archaeologist who has found the oldest example of extensive reliance on cereal and root staples in the diet of early Homo sapiens more than 100,000 years ago. ...> Full Article |
 | Ardipithecus ramidus, or "Ardi," receives the top honor as the Breakthrough of the Year, named by Science and its publisher, AAAS, the world's largest science society. "Ardi," a hominid species that lived 4.4 million years ago, was unveiled on Oct. 1 by Kent State University Professor of Anthropology Dr. C. Owen Lovejoy and his colleagues. ...> Full Article |
 | A University of Florida researcher has co-authored a study tracing the evolution of the modern opossum back to the extinction of the dinosaurs and finding evidence to support North America as the center of origin for all living marsupials. ...> Full Article |
 | 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 fossilization process that started with the death of the young cetacean, possibly a baleen whale from the Mysticeti group. ...> Full Article |
 | Infectious diseases can be transmitted by sneezing, touching, or -- for Tasmanian devils -- biting each other on the face, a habit that may have driven the dinosaurs to extinction through the transmission of a protozoan parasite. ...> Full Article |
 | Discovery of a new species of 213-million-year-old meat-eating dinosaur in New Mexico suggests the first dinosaurs wandered between parts of the Pangea supercontinent that later became North and South America, according to a team of researchers from the several institutions, including the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah. ...> Full Article |
An international group of anthropologists offers a new theory about the diffusion of maize to the Southwestern United States and the impact it had.
Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study, co-authored by Gayle Fritz, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, and colleagues, suggests that maize was passed from group to group of Southwestern hunter-gatherers.
...> Full Article
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New dinosaur discovered head first, for a change
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Pitt-led study debunks millennia-old claims of systematic infant sacrifice in ancient Carthage
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Ancient remains put teeth into Barker hypothesis