stasis

It takes a smart robot to mimic a reptile When researchers built a robot to sprawl like a prehistoric reptile, they were in for a surprise Early Permian era Orobates’ skeleton was “exquisitely preserved,” which created an excellent opportunity for researchers in paleontology to try to figure out how the lizard-like animal moved. And reverse engineering its movements can tell us a lot about how it lived. “It takes a smart robot to mimic a reptile” at Mind Matters It turns out walking, as opposed to sprawling, did not come about by the Darwinian method: It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that which is bad, Read More ›

The vertebrate family tree is all shook up, we hear, by a fossil hagfish (right: Cretaceous hagfish fossil, 100 mya/Tetsuto Miyashita, University of Chicago). From ScienceDaily: Paleontologists at the University of Chicago have discovered the first detailed fossil of a hagfish, the slimy, eel-like carrion feeders of the ocean. The 100-million-year-old fossil helps answer questions about when these ancient, jawless fish branched off the evolutionary tree from the lineage that gave rise to modern-day jawed vertebrates, including bony fish and humans. The fossil, named Tethymyxine tapirostrum,is a 12-inch long fish embedded in a slab of Cretaceous period limestone from Lebanon. It fills a 100-million-year gap in the fossil record and shows that hagfish are more closely related to the blood-sucking lamprey Read More ›

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 to now, a higher age for coralline red algae was thought to be so unlikely that fossils found in layers of rock older than the Cretaceous Period were not even considered as coralline red algae simply due to their age. The fossil record comprises all documented occurrences of fossils and is the essential source of information about how life on Earth developed. A re-evaluation of Read More ›

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 the Cretaceous millipedes found in the amber do not differ significantly from the species found in Southeast Asia nowadays, which is an indication of the old age of the extant millipede lineages. On the other hand, the diversity of the different orders seems to have changed drastically. For example, during the Age of the Dinosaurs, the group Colobognatha — millipedes characterised by their unusual elongated Read More ›

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 both predators and plant eaters—helped make freshwater communities more complex and more productive, says Zheng, moving them toward the ecosystems we see today. Elizabeth Pennisi, “Ancient insect graveyards reveal an explosion in bug diversity 237 million years ago” at Science A friend writes to say that the find is “significantly” earlier than expected – partly on account of fossil evidence, but also partly on account Read More ›

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, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on August 16 have uncovered the earliest definitive fossil evidence of that intimate relationship between cycads and insects. The discovery came in the form of an ancient boganiid beetle preserved in Burmese amber for an estimated 99 million years along with grains of cycad pollen. The beetle also shows special adaptations, including mandibular patches, for the transport of Read More ›