Paleontology

Finally caught up with season 2 and after my previous ranking it’s only fair I give my thoughts. Islands Overally a good episode, that even introduces us to the one named mammal (well, synapsid) of the series, Adalatherium. This is the contentious part sadly as it is portrayed as a…

If hunter-gatherers went beyond nose-to-tail eating to include the undigested plant matter in a prey animal’s stomach, assumptions about gendered division of labor start to fall apart. — By Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Curator of High Latitude and Western North American Archaeology, Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; Faculty Affiliate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, University of Michigan

This powerful predator was particularly parental. — Ah, motherhood. When I think of amazing mothers throughout the depths of time, in the long-gone epoch of prehistory, I think of Barbourofelis. Yes, that is correct. Barbourofelids were sabertoothed, catlike creatures that were, like nimravids, not exactly cats. …

Mammoth discovery by young explorer shocks local community — proves that trampoline breaks lead to historical finds. — On a seemingly ordinary day in Winston, Oregon, a nine-year-old boy named Jeremiah Longbrake stumbled upon what he thought was a dirty plastic container in a small creek. He used a stick to fish it out, as he didn’t want to leave pollution in the water. However, to his surprise…

Tracing the Fascinating Evolution of Our Anatomy — Humans are a unique species, with our advanced brains, language skills, and ability to create technology. But have you ever wondered how we got here? How did our ancestors evolve from apes to modern humans with our current anatomy? Warning: The content in this article is intended for adults aged…

One of my prized possessions is an original reprint of the seminal 1972 paper on punctuated equilibrium by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. Eldredge handed it to me early in 1973, when I started as a freshman work-study student at the American Museum of Natural History. It was the…

The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse… 305 million years ago, the Earth was a jungle planet. Swampy rainforests stretched across the earth, contiguous across a vast supercontinent called Laurasia. The world of the late Carboniferous era, as this period is known, was warm and humid. Its water-logged forests home to giant insects and amphibians; while our…

The sauropod skull is almost identical to that of a species called Diamantinasaurus matildae. — Sauropods are known for their incredibly long necks, and dinosaur necks were longer than a school bus. D. matildae is also a titanosaur, the only sauropod dinosaur to survive until the end of the Cretaceous (145–66 million years ago) before the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs. Archaeologists unearthed the specimen…