fossilized

The discovery of the world’s oldest fossilized forest in South West England, dating back 390 million years, provides crucial insights into the early forms of tree life and their impact on Earth’s landscapes during the Devonian Period. This groundbreaking research emphasizes the significant role of early trees in stabilizing environments and shaping the evolution of river systems. A forest of Calamophyton trees. Credit: Peter Giesen/Chris BerryThe oldest fossilized forest ever discovered on Earth, dating back 390 million…

Sanfordiacaulis model with simplified branching structure for easier visualization. Note that humans are provided for scale but did not exist concurrently with the tree. Credit: Tim StonesiferIn the fossil record, it’s common to find trees preserved merely as trunks, lacking any foliage that reveals their canopy structure or overall shape. However, a recent study published in the journal Current Biology, presents an extraordinary discovery of fossilized trees from New Brunswick, Canada, showcasing an unexpected and…

January 17, 20243 min readPermian period petroleum helped to preserve minute scraps of pebbly hide that probably belonged to a lizardlike creatureBy Emma Marris & Nature magazineDarkened, pebbly scraps are the oldest known 3D fossils of the skin of amniotes, a group that includes birds, reptiles and mammals. A dark shred of fossilized material, just a few millimetres across, “shocked” palaeontologists when they realized what it was. It arrived in a tiny glass vial, sent by fossil collectors in Oklahoma. “We got very…

People could be making tracks to see an impressive new exhibit of 320-million-year-old footprints at the Cape Breton Fossil Centre in Sydney Mines, N.S.A group of geologists from Cape Breton University recently found fossilized claw imprints that are remarkable for their size and age."The stuff we get on Cape Breton and in Nova Scotia in general, it runs literally anywhere from an order of under a centimetre to a few centimetres," Jason Loxton, a senior geology instructor at CBU and curator of the Cape Breton Fossil…

Researchers believe they’ve found the oldest known fossilized skin, hidden away in a limestone cave system in Oklahoma. The skin sample dates to the early Permian Period, between 289 million years ago and 286 million years ago.Are You Rich Enough to Buy This Folding TV?The skin belonged to an ancient reptile and is epidermis—the outer layer of skin in amniotes, a group that includes terrestrial reptiles, mammals, and birds. A study describing the skin as well as several other fossils found in the cave system is published…

How can you tell if a dinosaur is female or male? It’s one of the most basic aspects of biology and yet, for the most part, it continues to be a mystery in paleontology. We don’t yet know the sex of most extinct species, even if those in museum displays have gender-specific names like Sue the T.rex or Cliff the Triceratops. But this past October at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists, one scientist offered insight into the work he and his team are doing to uncover hormones in fossil bones.…

Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are killed annually by malaria and other diseases spread through the bite of mosquitoes, insects that date back to the age of dinosaurs. All of these bites are inflicted by females, which possess specialized mouth anatomy that their male counterparts lack.But it hasn't always been that way.Researchers said they have discovered the oldest-known fossils of mosquitoes — two males entombed in pieces of amber dating to 130 million years ago, during the Cretaceous Period, and found near…

A badger-like mammal died while chomping into the ribs of a hapless horned plant-eating dinosaur struggling to escape more than 100 million years ago. The pair were perfectly preserved, still locked in combat, in "China's dinosaur Pompeii," researchers report.Dating to the Cretaceous Period, the dramatic fossil unearthed in northeastern China shows the four-legged mammal Repenomamus robustus — the size of a domestic cat — ferociously entangled with the beaked two-legged dinosaur Psittacosaurus lujiatunensis, as big as a…

The most intriguing fossils tell a story about the animal’s life, or where and how it lived, and paleontologists have now uncovered a doozy. The fossils of a dinosaur and a small mammal have been discovered locked in combat when they apparently died together mid-fight, revealing new insights into the relationship between ancient reptiles and mammals.It’s often thought that during the reign of the dinosaurs, mammals were mostly small critters scurrying around under those giant scaly feet. But new studies are showing our…

LIG sea-level highstand in NW Europe.(A) Estimated LIG sea level in NW Europe after accounting for long-term deformation and glacial GIA, showing the median (solid blue line) posterior estimate of the Bayesian inversion along with the central 68% (darker shading) and 95% (lighter shading) probabilities. This quantity is only inferred for the time range 128 to 117 ka (see Materials and Methods). (B to D) Local sea-level model posteriors for specific…