Four hundred and thirty million years ago, according to ScienceDaily: The discovery made by FAU palaeontologists Dr. Sebastian Teichert, Prof. Dr. Axel Munnecke and their Australian colleague Dr. William Woelkerling has far-reaching consequences. ‘Our finds mean that we must now look at the fossil record in a completely new way’, explains Dr. Sebastian Teichert. Up […]
stasis
Some hatching mechanisms unchanged from 130 mya
One wonders whether the larval tubes (as opposed to clubs or bumps) relates to different plant species providing the camouflage, hence different portage methods used. Otherwise, this is a lovely example of stasis (for very long periods of time, evolution doesn’t seem to happen), trapped in amber
Key plant groups pushed back tens of millions of years
The report backdates the origin, not only of podocarps (the evergreens), but of seed ferns and cycad types of plants. Those are millions of years of natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism) that these plants did not turn out to have. If Darwinism seemed unbelievable before, what do you think now?
Millipedes found in 100 mya amber comprise 13 of 16 known groups
From ScienceDaily: Over 450 millipedes, fossilized in 100-million-year-old Burmese amber, were recently discovered by a research team. Using micro-CT technology, the scientists identified 13 out of the 16 main groups of modern millipedes amongst them. For half of these groups, the findings also represent the oldest known fossils. … According to the scientists, most of […]
Researchers: Flowers bloomed in early Jurassic, 50 million years earlier than thought
“Researchers were not certain where and how flowers came into existence because it seems that many flowers just popped up in the Cretaceous from nowhere,” explains lead author Qiang Fu” It now looks as though they just popped into the Jurassic from nowhere.
Feathers originated 70 million years earlier than thought
It certainly is “amazing,” as Professor Benton says, that a complex array of features appeared 250 million years ago, rather abruptly, just as life was recovering from the Permian extinction. Would anyone have predicted that? Talk about “fossil rabbits in the Cambrian.”
A Big Bang of insects in the mid- to late Triassic
About 237 million years ago: The sites underscore that this burst of evolution took place much earlier than researchers had thought, particularly for water-loving insects. Among the remains are fossil dragonflies, caddisflies, water boatmen, and aquatic beetles. Until now, paleontologists had thought such aquatic insects didn’t diversify until 130 million years ago. These insects—which include […]
Beetle trapped in amber 99 mya offers window into prehistoric ecology
Amber is, in some ways, like a very-slow motion vid. From ScienceDaily: Flowering plants are well known for their special relationship to the insects and other animals that serve as their pollinators. But, before the rise of angiosperms, another group of unusual evergreen gymnosperms, known as cycads, may have been the first insect-pollinated plants. Now, […]
Stasis: Dinosaur-era baby snake looks just like modern ones
From George Dvorsky at Gizmodo: Scientists working in Myanmar have uncovered a nearly 100-million-year-old baby snake encased in amber. Dating back to the Late Cretaceous, it’s the oldest known baby snake in the fossil record, and the first snake known to have lived in a forested environment. … The discovery of a baby snake fossilized […]
Lizards and snakes backdated to Permian era, lizards lost or changed limbs many times
From at ScienceDaily: The 240-million-year-old fossil, Megachirella wachtleri, is the most ancient ancestor of all modern lizards and snakes, known as squamates, the new study, published today in the journal Nature, shows. The fossil, along with data from both living and extinct reptiles — which involved anatomical data drawn from CT scans and DNA — […]
Gunter Bechly: “Living fossils” under massive attack
From David Klinghoffer at ENST: If you ever encounter a horseshoe crab on the beach, you are a looking at a creature that would not have appeared out of place hundreds of millions of years ago. Arthropods breathtakingly similar to this, says paleontologist Günter Bechly, go back “almost a half billion years without significant morphological […]
Colorful moth wings dated back to nearly 200 million years ago
From Laurel Hamers at Science News: Tiny light-scattering structures that give today’s butterflies and moths their brilliant hues date back to the days of the dinosaurs. Fossilized mothlike insects from the Jurassic Period bear textured scales on their forewings that could display iridescent colors, researchers report April 11 in Science Advances. The fossils are the […]
Researchers: Plants colonized Earth 100 mya earlier than thought
From ScienceDaily: For the first four billion years of Earth’s history, our planet’s continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes. All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals would later invade. The timing of this episode has […]
Stasis: Horses still have all five original digits, say researchers
From ScienceDaily: While it is largely believed that horses simply evolved with fewer digits, researchers pose a new theory that suggests remnants of all five toes are still present within the hooves of the horse. For the first time, as published in the January 24 issue of Royal Society Open Science, NYITCOM researcher, Nikos Solounias, […]
Fierce arthropod with “sophisticated head” from 508 mya
From ScienceDaily: Paleontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto have entirely revisited a tiny yet exceptionally fierce ancient sea creature called Habelia optata that has confounded scientists since it was first discovered more than a century ago. In those days, we had it all sewn […]