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Early Man

The Demise of the Neanderthal Species Concept
November 3, 2006
Can you call a population a separate species when it shares its distinctive characteristics with another species, and interbreeds readily?  A team of Romanian paleontologists, publishing in PNAS Nov. 3,1 re-evaluated some “poorly dated and largely ignored” skeletons of early modern human bones found in the Pestera Muierii region that, since 1952, had “never been […]
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Birds

Big Bad Bird: Ten-Foot “Terror Bird” Found
October 26, 2006
What would a “terror bird” look like? Imagine a ten-footer, able to disembowel you with a single kick and crush your skull in its jaws. That’s what scientists from the Dinosaur Institute of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History described in Nature1 after finding the largest-ever skull of a flightless phorusrhacid (‘terror bird’) in […]
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Fossils

Fossil Lamprey Changed Little in 360 Million Years
October 26, 2006
Lampreys, fish that consist of little more than a mouth with a tube-like body and fin, don’t usually fossilize well because they lack bones and hard cartilage.  A small two-inch fossil lamprey has been found in South Africa and reported in Nature1 (see also National Geographic, Live Science and EurekAlert based on a press release […]
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Dinosaurs

Dinos Not Killed Off by Meteor, but by Worms
October 24, 2006
Confident speculations that a big meteor hitting southern Mexico caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs appear to be unraveling.  Gerta Keller [Princeton, 09/25/2003], a doubter of the story that has been a leading contender for years with its smoking-gun crater called Chicxulub in the Yucatan, has been getting a receptive hearing among geologists with […]
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Early Man

Baby Lucy Makes National Geographic Evolution Cover
October 22, 2006
No regime change is evident at National Geographic since Bill Allen left (see 02/15/2005).  The Nov. 2006 is vintage NG with alleged primitive human ancestors on the cover, this time “Baby Lucy” (see 09/20/2006, 10/02/2006).  Despite many passionate letters to the editor after their in-your-face Darwinist two years ago (see “Was Darwin Wrong?” 10/24/2004), this […]
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Dumb Ideas

Have Darwinian Anthropologists Learnt Their Lessons?
October 18, 2006
Chris Stringer, writing for the BBC News, talked about “Piltdown’s lessons for modern science.”  After telling the history of the famous “missing link” fraud, he discussed four “lessons learnt” by one of the most notorious hoaxes in science history.  For one, “we mustn’t let preconceived ideas run away with us.”  For another, “specimens have to […]
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Fossils

Wanted Dead or Alive: New Mammals
October 18, 2006
Do we know all our fellow mammals?  Further research has uncovered new furry creatures, fur sure.  Furthermore, some are dead and some are alive and well: Weird Tooth:  An “ancient mammal that defies classification” has been given a name, at least.  EurekAlert reported that Horolodectes sunae, found 30 years ago in Alberta, remains a mystery: […]
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Fossils

Oxygen YoYos and Wings
October 18, 2006
Molecular oxygen: you can’t live with it, and you can’t live without it.  We breathe it in constantly or else we would turn blue and die within minutes.  Yet we take antioxidants because of the harm that oxygen radicals can wreak in our cells.  Like fire, it is a useful substance, but only when tightly […]
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Cell Biology

Precambrian Cell Division Imaged
October 17, 2006
Embryos frozen in stone in the act of cell division were reported in Science.1  According to a press release from Virginia Tech, there are millions of fossilized embryos in the Doushantuo formation in south China, estimated to be 551 million years old, but “later stages of these animals are rare.”  The EurekAlert version of this […]
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Dumb Ideas

Early Hunters Evolved Into Marathoners
October 11, 2006
Why are humans so good at endurance running?  According to Dan Lieberman of Harvard, “our body shape evolved to allow our ancestors to run long distances, and reach animal carcasses before other scavengers.”  He figured that “chasing animals until they collapse from exhaustion yields more meat per hunt than hunting with spears or a bow […]
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Early Man

More Scientists Claim “Hobbit Man” Was Fully Human
October 11, 2006
It was not a primitive form of Homo erectus that shrunk to a small stature because of being isolated on an island: it was one of us.  That’s what more scientists are saying about Homo floresiensis, the small-skulled pygmy skeletons found in Liang Bua cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia (10/27/2004)  The new […]
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Dinosaurs

Sea Monster Fossils Found in Arctic
October 6, 2006
The BBC News reported the discovery of over two dozen plesiosaurs, pliosaurs and ichthyosaurs (see 04/20/2005) north of Norway.  Skeletons of the large marine reptiles, completely assembled, were found buried in fine-grained sedimentary layers of black shale.  “Everything we’re finding is articulated,” said Jorn Harald Hurum, co-director of the dig.  “It’s not single bones here […]
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Early Man

Should Elephants and Lions Be Reintroduced to North America?
October 2, 2006
Believe it or not, some scientists think large mammals that existed in North America in prehistoric times should be brought back.  This is called “rewilding,” in hopes of healing some of the ecological disruption caused when early humans “played a significant role in their demise 13,000 years ago.”  A dozen scientists provided a detailed proposal […]
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Early Man

Was Baby Lucy Someone Else’s Kid?
October 2, 2006
Jeffrey Schwartz (U of Pittsburgh) thinks the “child” skeleton nicknamed “Lucy’s baby” celebrated in the news media last month (09/20/2006) was probably not the same species as Lucy.  In fact, he’s not sure if anyone knows what species the skeleton found in Hadar, Ethiopia is.  According to a press release on EurekAlert, without exposed teeth […]
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Early Man

The Trouble with Neanderthals
September 18, 2006
If nothing else, the scientific investigation of Neanderthal Man is valuable for illustrating how fluid scientific opinion can be.  Since we found out Sept. 1 that Neanderthal genes may be lurking among us, two more unexpected claims have been made about these wrestler-build members of genus Homo. Hideouts and Holdouts:  Some Neanderthals may have lived […]
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