This new paper in Nature describes some very early fossil mammals that appear to have glided like flying squirrels. Here's an accessible summary of the research.
A Late Cretaceous Ceratopsid from Mississippi
This seems to be the first North American ceratopsid fossil from east of the Mississippi.
Avian hip morphology
It turns out that ilium length in birds--an important aspect of hip morphology--correlates with the length of the sternal keel.
Oviraptorid with a crest like a cassowary
Corythoraptor could be an interesting case of convergent evolution.
Origination and extinction rates in ferns
A new paper uses a large dataset consisting of thousands of fossil samples of ferns to try to suss out what might account for variation in speciation and extinction rates. Interestingly, the causes of variation in origination rates seem to be different from what drives variation in extinction rates.
Studying the chemical signatures of 200 million year old fossil leaves
It's not possible to get any DNA fro 200 million year old plant fossils, but it turns out that the organic molecules in the leaves have distinctive chemical signatures. In a recent paper, scientists from Lund University in Sweden show how to use these chemical signatures to reconstruct plant phylogeny. Here is a press release that describes the work. Here's the paper.
Dinosaurs of the US National Parks
This blog post offers a nice overview of the dinosaurs found on land managed by the US National Park Service. There aren't as many as you might think, but it's still an interesting survey.
The "Hippopotamine Event"
A new paper appearing this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology helps to fill in a gap in the fossil record for hippos. Fossils from Chorora, Ethiopia, provide new information about the rapid diversification and increase in abundance of hippos that occurred around 8 million years ago. Here is a report on the work in Nature.
Important Caecilian fossils from the Triassic shed some light on the early evolution of amphibians
A new paper just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences promises to shed some light on the relationships of early amphibians. It looks like caecilians, which still exist today, were around way back in the Triassic, and that they may have been closely related to stereospondylids. Here is an accessible summary of the research.
New insights on speciation in birds
New research published in PNAS looks at the rate at which genetic differences accumulate in populations of birds. Here is a summary of the work. And here's the original paper. The researchers assessed the rate of genetic differentiation in 173 species of birds, and then showed that higher rates of genetic differentiation correlate with higher speciation rates over longer timescales.
H. sapiens might be older than we thought
Human remains found in Morocco at a site called Jebel Irhoud suggest that our species might be much older than anyone thought--possibly 300,000 years old. Here is a summary of the work. Here is the paper in Nature. And here is a second paper that covers the techniques used to date the remains. The researchers used thermoluminescence dating on lithics that were associated with the human skeletal remains.
Baby Bird Preserved in Amber
Here is a report on the remarkable fossil from Myanmar.
T. rex had scaly skin
Mummified Nodosaur from Alberta
Wherein Turner wins a thing, and we embarrass him
“one of the most productive, original and well-respected scholars in multiple emerging subfields in the philosophy of science.”
http://www.conncoll.edu/news/news-archive/2017/four-honored-with-colleges-highest-faculty-awards.html#.WQulXca1s2x