Fossil and Archaeology News - February 2009 Archives

1.5 million-year-old fossil humans walked on modern feet (2/27/2009)

Footprints found at Ileret, Kenya, display anatomically modern features ...> Full Article

13,000 Clovis-era tool cache unearthed in Colorado shows evidence of camel, horse butchering (2/26/2009)

More than 80 stone implements discovered together in Boulder city limits by landscapers ...> Full Article

'Fattysaurus' or 'thinnysaurus'? How dinosaurs measure up with laser imaging (2/22/2009)

University of Manchester scientists are using laser imaging to investigate how fat -- or fit -- T. rex and his fellow dinosaurs were. ...> Full Article

Air-filled bones helped prehistoric reptiles take first flight (2/21/2009)

Study takes new look at skeletal system of pterosaurs and their modern relatives ...> Full Article

Anthropologist's studies of childbirth bring new focus on women in evolution (2/20/2009)

Contrary to the TV sitcom where the wife experiencing strong labor pains screams at her husband to stay away from her, women rarely give birth alone. Assisted birth has likely been around for millennia, possibly dating as far back as 5 million years ago when our ancestors first began walking upright, according to University of Delaware paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg. She says that social assistance during childbirth is just one aspect of our evolutionary heritage that makes us distinctive as humans. ...> Full Article

Stanford: Using synchrotron X-rays to tease the hidden secrets of dinosaurs and old documents (2/19/2009)

A powerful tool for reading beneath the paint on a parchment document containing the thoughs of Archimedes ...> Full Article

High-tech tests allow anthropologists to track ancient hominids across the landscape (2/18/2009)

Dazzling new scientific techniques are allowing archaeologists to track the movements and menus of extinct hominids through the seasons and years as they ate their way across the African landscape, helping to illuminate the evolution of human diets. ...> Full Article

Leading edge facility to strip history bare (2/17/2009)

A new facility opening later this year at the Diamond synchrotron is set to revolutionize world heritage science. A new research platform soon to be available at the leading UK science facility, Diamond Light Source, will help uncover ancient secrets that have been locked away for centuries. For the first time ever, cultural heritage scientists will be able to scan and image large relics and artifacts up to two tons in weight in incredible precision. ...> Full Article

Deducing the diet of a prehistoric hominid (2/14/2009)

In an unusual intersection of materials science and anthropology, researchers from NIST and the George Washington University have applied materials-science-based mathematical models to help shed light on the dietary habits of some of mankind's prehistoric relatives. ...> Full Article

New evidence from excavations in Arcadia, Greece, supports theory of the 'Birth of Zeus' (2/13/2009)

According to Dr. David Gilman Romano, senior research scientist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, new excavation evidence indicates that Zeus' worship was established on Mt. Lykaion as early as the Late Helladic period, if not before, more than 3,200 years ago. ...> Full Article

Despite their diversity, pygmies of Western Central Africa share recent common ancestors (2/10/2009)

Despite the great cultural, physical, and genetic diversity found amongst the numerous West Central African human populations that are collectively designated as "Pygmies," a report published online on Feb. 5 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, finds that they diverged from a single ancestral population just about 2,800 years ago. ...> Full Article

Famous fossil Lucy scanned at the University of Texas at Austin (2/9/2009)

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with the Ethiopian government, have completed the first high-resolution CT scan of the world's most famous fossil, Lucy, an ancient human ancestor who lived 3.2 million years ago. ...> Full Article

Census of modern organisms reveals echo of ancient mass extinction (2/8/2009)

Paleontologists can still hear the echo of the death knell that drove the dinosaurs and many other organisms to extinction following an asteroid collision at the end of the Cretaceous Period 65 million years ago. "The evolutionary legacy of the end-Cretaceous extinction is very much with us. In fact, it can be seen in virtually every marine community, every lagoon, every continental shelf in the world," said University of Chicago paleontologist David Jablonski. ...> Full Article

Origin of claws seen in 390-million-year-old fossil (2/7/2009)

A missing link in the evolution of the front claw of living scorpions and horseshoe crabs was identified with the discovery of a 390-million-year-old fossil by researchers at Yale and the University of Bonn, Germany. ...> Full Article

Researchers find earliest evidence for animal life (2/6/2009)

An international team of scientists has found the oldest evidence for animals in the fossil record. The researchers examined sedimentary rocks in south Oman, and found an anomalously high amount of steroids that date back to 635 million years ago, to around the end of the last ice age. The steroids are produced by sponges. The discovery of the sponges is evidence for multi-cellular animal life beginning 100 million years before the Cambrian explosion. ...> Full Article

At 2,500 pounds and 43 feet, prehistoric snake is the largest on record (2/6/2009)

Scientists have recovered fossils from a 60-million-year-old South American snake whose length and weight might make today's anacondas and reticulated pythons seem a bit cuter and more cuddly. Named Titanoboa cerrejonensis by its discoverers, the size of the snake's vertebrae suggest it weighed 1,140 kilograms (2,500 pounds) and measured 13 meters (42.7 feet) nose to tail tip -- and that's a conservative estimate. A report describing the find appears in this week's Nature. ...> Full Article

Early whales gave birth on land, fossil find reveals (2/5/2009)

Two newly described fossil whales -- a pregnant female and a male of the same species -- reveal how primitive whales gave birth and provide new insights into how whales made the transition from land to sea. ...> Full Article

Early humans had 'jaws of steel' (2/4/2009)

New research published in the February 2009 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals nut-cracking abilities in our 250-million-year-old relatives that enabled them to alter their diet to adapt to changes in food sources in their environment. Mark Spencer, an Arizona State University assistant professor, and doctoral student Caitlin Schrein in ASU's School of Human Evolution and Social Change, are part of the international team of researchers who devised the study. ...> Full Article

Ancient turtle migrated from Asia to America over a tropical Arctic (2/2/2009)

In Arctic Canada, a team of geologists from the University of Rochester has discovered a surprise fossil: a tropical, freshwater, Asian turtle.The find strongly suggests that animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean. ...> Full Article