A new paper in the Journal of Human Evolution presents evidence against the hypothesis that the "Hobbits" of the island of Flores are descended from H. erectus. Instead, the authors argue that we have to go deeper into the family tree to find the common ancestor that we humans share with H. floresiensis. Here's an accessible summary of the findings.
Early archosaur from Tanzania with Croc-like ankles
A new paper in Nature reports on Teleocrater, an early Triassic archosaur, more closely related to dinosaurs and birds than to crocodilians, but with ankle bones that retain some croc-like features. The New York Times also reports on the research here.
Rethinking the dinosaur family tree
A new study published in Nature challenges the deeply entrenched distinction between ornithischian and saurischian dinosaurs. What if therapods were more closely related to ornithischian dinosaurs than they were to sauropods? Here is a nice discussion of the research in The Atlantic.
Pinning down the timing of the bison invasion of N. America
A recent paper in PNAS uses ancient DNA research to determine when bison first "invaded" North and South America. The iconic symbols of the N. American west haven't actually been here that long. It turns out that the first migration of bison from Asia occurred between 195 and 135 thousand years ago. Here is a shorter report on the research from The New York Times.
Gregg Caruso on Fossil Hunting
Over at the philospher's cacoon, Gregg Caruso (philosopher at SUNY Corning) discusses his passion for fossil hunting.
"Mitigation and salvage paleontology"
This article in the Washington Post describes efforts to protect fossils at construction sites in California.
A platinum anomaly provides suggestive evidence of a Younger Dryas impact
Understanding the causes of the end-Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in the western hemisphere is really complicated. Recently we shared news of research that appeared to count against the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. But a new paper offers fresh evidence in favor of that hypothesis: Traces of platinum found at archaeological sites of the right age.
New podcast features interviews with philosophers of science
Nick Zautra (Indiana University) interviews philosophers of science, including one previous contributor to the Extinct Blog.
Interactive Map for the Paleobiology Database
This is really fun! You can now see which fossils have been found in a particular region.
Canadian microfossils might be 3.77 billion years old
Scientists keep pushing back the age of the earliest known fossils, which also suggests earlier and earlier dates for the first appearance of life on Earth. A new paper in Nature reports on microfossils from Canada alleged to be almost 3.8 billion years old. (Here is an accessible discussion in The Washington Post.)
Evolving Flight: Messier Than You Might Think...
Getting from a little theropod-thing to a fully-powered flying bird-thing is often presented as a pretty direct trajectory, as "as a long evolutionary march in which natural selection progressively refined one subgroup of dinosaurs into ever-better aerialists". In a new paper in science, Stephen Brusatte argues that recent fossil finds suggest that things were way crazier than that...
Evidence for the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis fails to turn up
Did an extra-terrestrial impact cause the cooling event known as the Younger Dryas, 12,900 years ago? According to this recent paper in the Journal of Quaternary Science (also discussed here), that hypothesis predicts the occurrence of tiny nano-diamonds. But those have failed to turn up.
New research on mass extinction periodicity
Paleontologists are now taking a closer look at Lisa Randall's suggestion that the periodicity of mass extinctions can be explained by the solar system's bobbing up and down through the galactic plane, where a disc of dark matter dislodges objects from the Oort cloud. Here is an earlier discussion of Randall's idea.
Evidence that some ancient marine reptiles gave live birth.
The Lost World of Appalachia
Here is a fun piece of prehistory writing by Asher Elbein. In North America, much attention has focused on the Cretaceous ecosystems of Larimidia. But what about the territory east of the seaway that divided what is now North America? What about the prehistory of Appalachia?