Dating Methods

VIEW HEADLINES ONLY

Soft Muscle Tissue Found in Fossil Salamander

November 6, 2009

More soft tissue has been found in a fossil – this time in a salamander said to be 18 million years old. The article on PhysOrg called it “the highest quality soft tissue preservation ever documented in the fossil record.” Unlike the previous discoveries of fossil tissue inside bone or amber, the recognizable […]

Uncategorized

Ferocity of Geological Change Stuns Scientists

November 4, 2009

A crack in Ethiopia 500 meters long took just days to form. New Scientist reported about a team of scientists who used seismic sensors to reconstruct the event. “They found that a 60-kilometre-long, 8-metre-wide dike of solidified magma formed in the rift, causing the crack, in a matter of days.” They believe the crack will […]

Fossils

Trilobites Found in Fools Gold: What Does It Mean?

October 27, 2009

Trilobites are icons of the Cambrian and Ordovician periods. When thousands are found in beds over a wide area encased in pyrite, with no sign of decay, what does it mean? A team publishing their findings in Geology suggests it means rapid burial.1 Here’s the abstract from their paper: Pyritization of soft tissues is extremely […]

Dumb Ideas

Whats in a Name? Sima Fossils Confuse Human Evolution Story

October 14, 2009

“A hush fell over the room….” Ian Tattersall had just astonished paleoanthropologists gathered for a meeting on human origins in Gibraltar. The group was puzzling over a treasure trove of hominin bones found in the mid-1990s at Sima de los Huesos in Spain. What should they be called? The co-discoverer, Juan Luis Arsuaga, […]

Physics

Giant Backward Ring Found Around Saturn

October 7, 2009

Saturn has a newly-discovered ring to add to its decor – the largest of all. It’s so big, it makes Saturn look like a speck in the middle of it. The ring, located at the orbit of the small outer moon Phoebe, is inclined 27 degrees and revolves backwards around Saturn. This was announced today […]

Darwin and Evolution

Step Aside Lucy; Its Ardi Time

October 2, 2009

A new fossil human ancestor has taken center stage. Those who love Lucy, the australopithecine made famous by Donald Johanson (and numerous TV specials), are in for a surprise. Lucy is a has been. Her replacement is not Desi Arnaz, but is designated Ardi, short for Ardipithecus ramidus – the new leading lady in the […]

Solar System

Mars Red-Faced Without Water

September 21, 2009

The Martians are singing How dry I am. Scientists have a new explanation for how Mars turned red without water: it’s just dry dust tumbling in the wind. This new hypothesis was announced by Live Science, Science Daily, New Scientist, and Space.com, based on a presentation at the European Planetary Science Congress last week.1 […]

Early Man

Human Evolution Story Confounded Again

September 9, 2009

Human fossils in Georgia (Asia) have confounded the timeline of human evolution again. The UK newspaper Independent reported that the 3 skulls of Homo erectus are rewriting the history of man. If these are as old as claimed (1.8 million years), it would toss overboard the long held belief that modern humans first emerged in […]

Fossils

Permian Extinction Recovery Story Stretches Credibility

September 4, 2009

It goes without saying that Darwin’s theory fits hand in glove with the geological dating scheme, but how reliable is the latter? The textbook age names – Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Eocene and all the rest – have taken on their own life as assumed truths. Every once in awhile, though, papers are published that require […]

Physics

Whats Up With the Planets?

August 27, 2009

Here are planets and moons making news in our celestial neighborhood, the solar system. Maybe we’ll drop in on another neighborhood while we’re looking around. Venus resurfacing: Planetary geologists can’t get away from the evidence that Venus underwent a planet-wide volcanic resurfacing epoch. Crater counts and lava flow surveys leave little room for doubt that, […]

Biomimetics

Feather Technology Resurrected in Printer After 40 Million Years

August 26, 2009

A fossil bird feather from Germany still shows that melanosomes – the cell organelles that produce iridescent colors in feathers – are still visible after an alleged 40 million years. The structures were long thought to be remnants of bacteria that fed on the organic matter, but now are seen to consist of original feather […]

Geology

Paper View: A Geology Paradigm Suffers a Paradox

August 7, 2009

A pair of geologists found a paradox in a paradigm. That paradigm is the belief that ancient ocean levels rose and fell in cycles as ice sheets retreated and advanced, and the cause of the cycles was periodic changes in earth’s orbit. They modeled this process and couldn’t get it to work. They couldn’t get […]

Dinosaurs

Dino Protein Confirmed

August 2, 2009

An independent study of bone marrow contents from a T. rex that was reported in 2007 to contain fragments of protein has confirmed the claim, reported Science Daily. Seven peptides from collagen, and apparently traces from hemoglobin, were detected. The findings are scheduled to be published in the Sept. 4 issue of Journal of Proteome […]

Dinosaurs

Dakota Dino Reveals Skin Cells

July 1, 2009

“Absolutely amazing” and “absolutely gobsmacking” are exclamations made by scientists analyzing the fossilized skin of a hadrosaur.

Uncategorized

Raising a Titanic Geological Plateau

June 24, 2009

The Colorado Plateau is a huge region covering parts of four states. It’s over a mile higher than its surroundings, but its layers are remarkably flat. How did this region, littered with marine fossils, rise into the sky? Three American scientists writing in Nature last week believe they have a mechanism:1 it heated from underneath […]

All Posts by Date

[archives type="yearly" cat_id="1526"]