Category Archives: Paleontology

I was just about to write about this story, but Grrrrl scoooped me and summarized it so well, I’ll just ask you to go there.
Oh, btw, it is about an incredible discovery of about one hundred dinosaur eggs and some tracks around them.

Norwegian scientists have discovered a “treasure trove” of fossils belonging to giant sea reptiles that roamed the seas at the time of the dinosaurs.
The 150 million-year-old fossils were uncovered on the Arctic island chain of Svalbard – about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole.
The finds belong to two groups of extinct marine reptiles – the plesiosaurs and the ichthyosaurs.
One skeleton has been nicknamed The Monster because of its enormous size.

The Monster is an 8m long pliosaur with a most complete skeleton of such an animal ever found:

Read the details…

Archy has totally switched from mammoths (and Republicans) to mastodons. He explains the news on the tuberculosis in their bones and what that has to do with their extinction.

Paleontologists Find 67 Dinosaurs In One Week:

He was specifically looking for Psittacosaurus fossils because it was a very common dinosaur and would give him lots of specimens, Horner said. It would also keep away poachers and commercial fossil hunters who work in the area, but prefer rare fossils. Horner wants a large number of fossils so he can compare variations between skeletons and changes during growth.
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The paleontologists found two meat-eating fossils in Mongolia in addition to the Psittacosaurus, Horner said. One of them looked like a raptor and may be a new species, but Horner said, “We find new species all the time. … A hundred Psittacosauruses are a lot more interesting to me than new species.”

The find of a knife flake together with a mammoth dated at 16,000 yo, spurs new speculations about pre-Clovis humans in the Americas. This is the clearest description I ever found of a possible alternative hypothesis to Bering-Clovis.

Hey, I just came here – don’t even know where the bathroom is, yet the SEED overlords are already making demands – the “Ask the ScienceBlogger” question of the week. At least they picked a relatively easy one for us rookies this week – no need for a two-part post of 4000 words each, written after hours of research on the topic….Here it is:

Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?

Something outdoors. Anything outdoors! Get me out of the house and lab, please! Now!
If I was not doing what I am doing (and believe me, I cannot wait to get back in the lab and do again what I am doing), I doubt I would leave biology for another science altogether, but it would be something completely different, something involving the Great Outdoors in wild and crazy places on the planet. So, let’s not nitpick on the precise definition of “discipline”…
Choice #1, appealing to the child in me, is digging dinosaurs. Can you imagine spending one summer in Montana, next summer in Sahara, and the next one in Gobi, then plan for the following one in Argentina?
Wonderful! Do I really need to go into the “Why” part of the question or is it obvious enough?