Mammoth kill site in New Mexico

There's new evidence that early North American's were hunting and processing mammoths. This is relevant to the ongoing discussion of the Pleistocene overkill hypothesis, though the mammoths were just one of many large animal species that went extinct at the end of the Pleistocene.

Maturity, dinosaurs, confusion...

Of late, several paleontologists have started to wonder whether we've been misidentifying dinosaurs of different ontogenetic stages (i.e., ages) as being different species (most infamously, the suggestion that Triceratops and Torosaurus were the same critter). But how do we tell when a specimen is from an adult, mature dinosaur? In this new paper, Hone, Farke & Wedel tackle just this question, and draw some possibly troubling conclusions about how paleontologists determine and define ontogenetic stages...

Darwin in Modern English?

Daniel Duzdevdich recently wrote an updated version of Darwin's classic On the Origin of Species - attempting to free the book from its (apparently) stilted Victorian prose. Michael Ruse, it seems, didn't like it. Over at the NCSE's blog, Duzdevdich has defended his book. Both review and response contain comparisons of the original to the new text. Here at Extinct, we don't treat Darwin with total reverence, so invite readers to decide for themselves...

Gall wasps and oak trees: 30 million years of stability

Gall wasps are so named because they inject chemicals into trees that create abnormal growth patterns (galls) that shelter the wasps' own developing larvae. In this cool recent study, paleontologists looked at the fossil record (over 2,900 fossil leaves from the western U.S., with the oldest about 45 million years old) in order to see how stable the relationship is between gall wasps and their preferred host trees.  This is possible because the galls are sometimes preserved in the fossil record. It turns out that galls associated with Cynipini wasps only occur on the leaves of just two types of oak trees, and that the association remains stable over about 30 million years: An interesting case of stability in an ecological relationship! This raises some interesting evolutionary questions about why parasites do (or in this case, don't) shift their hosts.

E.H. Leckey and D. H. Smith, "Host fidelity over geologic time: restricted use of oaks by oak gall wasps," Journal of Paleontology, vol. 89, no. 2. (March 2015), 236-244. 

Ancient Megafauna Found at OSU

Construction workers expanding Oregon State University's football stadium in Corvallis, Oregon have dug up what appear to be mammoth, bison, and camel fossils dating to the early Holocene. What a boon for OSU's archaeology students! Read about it here.

Dick Levins Dies...

Richard "Dick" Levins, a scientist who had a profound and encouraging impact on the philosophy of biology, passed away on the 19th of January. There is a nice reflection on him, focusing on his anti-deterministic and dialectical focus, here
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Evidence of violence around 10,000 years ago

New evidence from Kenya suggests that people were killing each other around 10,000 years ago. Whether this should be described as war is contested. See the article published in Nature here. The New York Times reports the story here.

Applying Phylogenetic Analyses to Fairytales?

Paleontologists and 'neontologists' (those rather boring biologists who study living animals) often use phylogenetic methods to trace the ancestry of the critters they study. These same methods can also be applied to languages and - it turns out - fairytales. We at Extinct have no idea about the trustworthiness or otherwise of the methods for this application, but the results are pretty fascinating (suggesting at least one piece of folk-lore has survived from the bronze-age!).

Here's the original study,

And here's a nice summary.

Enjoy Ranking Dinosaurs? Here's the survey for you...

Here at Extinct we very much approve of favorite-dinosaur-ranking, and it looks like over at A Dinosaur a Day they're taking this to a new level. Here's the survey: http://a-dinosaur-a-day.com/post/137382419960/a-very-long-but-very-important-survey

Looking forwards to the results!

That's not a crocodile, THIS is a crocodile...

To file away under 'really big extinct things', they've just published findings on a 10 meter long cretaceous crocodile. Interestingly, the article also involves a bit of speculation about the nature of the extinction event separating the Jurassic and the Cretaceous...

Here's a nice article in the Washington Post

And here's the paper...