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How Snakes Lost Their Limbs

Penn State scientists have a story for how snakes, which presumably evolved from lizards, lost their legs.  They had to burrow through tight places.     Part of their story involved disproving that snakes evolved from sea-going reptiles, like mosasaurs, explains the press release from Penn State’s Eberly College of Science.  They compared genes from […]

How Darwinism Produces Job Security

One thing Darwinism has going for it: it provides endless opportunities to research stories that are nearly impossible to prove.     A case in point was provided in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature.1  John R. Hutchinson (Royal Veterinary College, UK), in a News and Views article on bird evolution, reviewed the new angle […]

If a Meteor Roasted the Dinosaurs, Where’s the Charcoal?

A majority of scientists continue to believe that a falling asteroid felled the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but problems remain.  London geologists went looking for evidence of charcoal at the Cretaceous-Tertiary layers, when the assumed impact occurred, assuming that the force of impact would have ignited a worldwide conflagration (thus the extinction of the […]

Dinosaur Family Tracks Discovered

A set of dinosaur tracks of different sizes pointing in the same direction has been found on the Isle of Skye, reports the BBC News.  It seems to indicate one adult and 10 juveniles, all of the same species, were moving together.  To Neil Clark, curator of the Glasgow Museum, these tracks tell a story […]

Waltzing with Dinosaurs

51; An international team of paleontologists wrote a kind of “State of the Tyrannosaur Address” in Science last week,1 boasting about all that is known of these creatures: Tyrannosaurs, the group of dinosaurian carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and its closest relatives, are icons of prehistory.  They are also the most intensively studied extinct dinosaurs, […]

Farewell, Cannibal Dino

Whoops, We Were Wrong Dept.:  Fossils of Coelophysis found in 1947 included members of the same species in the stomach, so they were cannibals, right?  Not so fast, corrects an article in BBC News.  The food now looks more like filet of crocodile.  After re-examining the evidence, researchers from Columbia University and the American Museum […]

Dinos Found in Spain, Croatia

Dinosaur fossils continue to be discovered around the world.  The BBC news hints that surprises may be forthcoming from a new cache in Spain that has yielded stegosaurs, crocodilians and carnivorous dinosaurs, and a pelvic bone possibly from Diplodocus.  On a resort island of Croatia, trackways of titanosaurs have been discovered, reports EurekAlert.  The BBC […]

Ichthyosaurs Suddenly Appeared in Triassic Oceans

“Ichthyosaurs were a group of Mesozoic marine reptiles that evolved fish-shaped body outlines,” begins Ryosuke Motani (UC Davis) in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences,1 in a paper on “Evolution of Fish-Shaped Reptiles… in Their Physical Environments and Constraints.”  But while much is said about their environments and constraints, little is said to […]

Dinosaurs of the Month

The tools of paleontologists continue to turn up interesting things.  Here are some of the latest dinosaur discoveries reported this month: Mighty mouth:  An African theropod with massive, shark-like teeth was found in the African Sahara, reported National Geographic News and PhysOrg.  It was named Eocarcharia dinops, or “fierce-eyed dawn shark.”  Another similar individual, presumed […]

Daffy Duck Found in Dino Park

A fossil duck from the Cretaceous has been discovered, indicating that the branch of birds including waterfowl already coexisted with the dinosaurs.  A press release from NC State explains the significance of the paper published in Nature1 this week.  Dr. Julia Clarke and colleagues say this means that “at least duck, chicken and ratite bird […]
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