Flannel Shirt

Extinct flightless bat that lived in burrows

Ugly little cusses.

 

This is a crinoid

It went extinct about 250 million years ago.

Pre-dinosaur

He was a pre-dinosaur that evolved into dinosaurs, but his head looked sort of like a crocodile's head. 

Giant gerbils

Once gigantic gerbils roamed South America. Really.

A half-billion year-old legged worm.

Interesting thing

Microleo attenboroughi

A tiny marsupial lion, named after David Attenborough.

Very old teeth

This changes things.

The old story was that modern humans, when they came out of Africa wiped out the inferior Neanderthals in Europe. But the old story has been changing. First, it turns out that humans made love, not war. I'm carrying 2.6% Neanderthal DNA. 

But above is a picture of very old modern human teeth... in China. How old? Read the article, but apparently modern humans were in China something like over a hundred thousand years ago, and a lot longer than when they finally colonized Europe. 

China is a lot farther from Africa than Europe. The new theory is that when modern humans came out of Africa and into the Middle East they found it easier to head east across the Himalayas than mess with the Neanderthals in Europe. It wasn't until around 45,000 years ago that modern humans started appearing in Europe.

Were Neanderthals so tough or clever as to keep moderns out of their territory? Perhaps they were just entrenched enough in their niche to make it just a lot more difficult for moderns to move in. What we do know is that there was a lot of ice and snow. Glaciers were sliding back and forth across Europe and there was a bad stretch of volcanic activity not long before the moderns showed up in Europe. So maybe the changing climates and volcanic activity wiped out a lot of the Neanderthals, allowing moderns to move in and absorb the remainder of the Neanderthals. 

All this will be clarified or disproven with the discoveries to come. 

Everything was bigger back then

Back then being a hundred million years ago. Or so.

Scientists at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt have described the world's oldest fossil sea turtle known to date. The fossilized reptile is at least 120 million years old -- which makes it about 25 million years older than the previously known oldest specimen. The almost completely preserved skeleton from the Cretaceous, with a length of nearly 2 meters, shows all of the characteristic traits of modern marine turtles. The study was published in the scientific journal PaleoBios.

"Santanachelys gaffneyi is the oldest known sea turtle" -- this sentence from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no longer up-to-date. "We described a fossil sea turtle from Colombia that is about 25 million years older," said Dr. Edwin Cadena, a scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at the Senckenberg Research Institute. Cadena made the unusual discovery together with his colleague from the US, J. Parham of California State University, Fullerton.

"The turtle described by us as Desmatochelys padillai sp. originates from Cretaceous sediments and is at least 120 million years old," says Cadena. Sea turtles descended from terrestrial and freshwater turtles that arose approximately 230 million years ago. During the Cretaceous period, they split into land and sea dwellers. Fossil evidence from this time period is very sparse, however, and the exact time of the split is difficult to verify. "This lends a special importance to every fossil discovery that can contribute to clarifying the phylogeny of the sea turtles," explains the turtle expert from Columbia.

The fossilized turtle shells and bones come from two sites near the community of Villa de Leyva in Colombia. The fossilized remains of the ancient reptiles were discovered and collected by hobby paleontologist Mary Luz Parra and her brothers Juan and Freddy Parra in the year 2007. Since then, they have been stored in the collections of the "Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas" in Villa Leyva and the "University of California Museum of Paleontology."

Cadena and his colleague examined the almost complete skeleton, four additional skulls and two partially preserved shells, and they placed the fossils in the turtle group Chelonioidea, based on various morphological characteristics. Turtles in this group dwell in tropical and subtropical oceans; among their representatives are the modern Hawksbill Turtle and the Green Sea Turtle of turtle soup fame.

"Based on the animals' morphology and the sediments they were found in, we are certain that we are indeed dealing with the oldest known fossil sea turtle," adds Cadena in summary.

 

 

Six-foot long sea scorpion

But from around 500 million years ago.

You don't name a sea creature after an ancient Greek warship unless it's built like a predator.

That's certainly true of the recently discovered Pentecopterus, a giant sea scorpion with the sleek features of a penteconter, one of the first Greek galley ships. A Yale University research team says Pentecopterus lived 467 million years ago and could grow to nearly six feet, with a long head shield, a narrow body, and large, grasping limbs for trapping prey. It is the oldest described eurypterid -- a group of aquatic arthropods that are ancestors of modern spiders, lobsters, and ticks.

A detailed description of the animal appears in the Sept. 1 online edition of the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.

"This shows that eurypterids evolved some 10 million years earlier than we thought, and the relationship of the new animal to other eurypterids shows that they must have been very diverse during this early time of their evolution, even though they are very rare in the fossil record," said James Lamsdell, a postdoctoral associate at Yale University and lead author of the study.

"Pentecopterus is large and predatory, and eurypterids must have been important predators in these early Palaeozoic ecosystems," Lamsdell said.

Geologists with the Iowa Geological Survey at the University of Iowa discovered the fossil bed in a meteorite crater by the Upper Iowa River in northeastern Iowa. Fossils were then unearthed and collected by temporarily damming the river in 2010. Researchers from Yale and the University of Iowa have led the analysis.

The fossil-rich site yielded both adult and juvenile Pentecopterusspecimens, giving the researchers a wealth of data about the animal's development. In addition, the researchers said, the specimens were exceptionally well preserved.

"The Winneshiek site is an extraordinary discovery," said Yale paleontologist Derek Briggs, co-author of the study. "The fossils are preserved in fine deposits of sediments where the sea flooded a meteorite impact crater just over 5 km in diameter." Briggs is the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Professor of Geology and Geophysics at Yale and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

"What's amazing is the Winneshiek fauna comprise many new taxa, including Pentecopterus, which lived in a shallow marine environment, likely in brakish water with low salinity that was inhospitable to typical marine taxa," said Huaibao Liu of the Iowa Geological Survey and the University of Iowa, who led the fossil dig and is a co-author of the paper. "The undisturbed, oxygen-poor bottom waters within the meteorite crater led to the fossils' remarkable preservation. So this discovery opens a new picture of the Ordovician community that is significantly different from normal marine faunas."