Interesting News Of The Day

Monstrous Skull Fossil Found in UK
AP
posted: 6 HOURS 56 MINUTES AGOcomments: 287filed under: Science News, World News
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LONDON (Oct. 27) - British authorities say the fossilized skull of a giant sea monster has been found off England's southern coast.
The fossil came from a pliosaur, a ferocious predator that lived in the oceans 150 million years ago.

The skull was discovered in Dorset by a collector and measures 8 feet in length. The discovery was announced Tuesday.
Scientists believe the creature would have been about 52 feet long.
David Martill, a paleontologist from the University of Portsmouth, says pliosaurs had short necks and huge, crocodile-like heads with powerful jaws and a set of razor-sharp teeth.
He said they used paddle-like limbs to propel their bodies through the water and were generally carnivores.
The skull will be put on display in a Dorset museum.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

Prostitution for the religion of sports:

Police: Woman Offered Sex for Tickets
AP
posted: 1 HOUR 37 MINUTES AGOcomments: 132filed under: Crime News, National News
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BENSALEM, Pa. (Oct. 27) -- Police in a Philadelphia suburb they've arrested a woman who offered sex for World Series tickets.
Bensalem police say 43-year-old Susan Finkelstein was arrested on Tuesday.
Investigators say Finkelstein posted an ad on the Web site Craigslist that stated she was a die-hard Phillies fan and buxom blonde in desperate need of two World Series tickets.
Police say her posting went on to say the price was negotiable and that "I'm the creative type! Maybe we can help each other!"
An undercover officer responded to the ad. Police say Finkelstein offered to perform various sex acts in exchange for World Series tickets.
She is charged with prostitution and related offenses. Her listed phone number was disconnected, and it couldn't immediately be determined if she had an attorney.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2009-10-27 16:44:21

Science News

Fossil Skull of Giant Toothy Seabird Found
By ANDREW WHALEN, AP
posted: 5 HOURS 55 MINUTES AGOcomments: 28filed under: Animal News, Science News, World NewsPrintShareText SizeAAA

LIMA, Peru (Feb. 28) - The unusually intact fossilized skull of a giant, bony-toothed seabird that lived up to 10 million years ago was found on Peru's arid southern coast, researchers said Friday.
The fossil is the best-preserved cranium ever found of a pelagornithid, a family of large seabirds believed to have gone extinct some 3 million years ago, said Rodolfo Salas, head of vertebrate paleontology at Peru's National History Museum.
The museum said in a statement that the birds had wingspans of up to 20 feet and may have used the toothlike projections on their beaks to prey on slippery fish and squid. But studying members of the Pelagornithidae family has been difficult because their extremely thin bones — while helpful for keeping the avian giants aloft — tended not to survive as fossils.
"Its fossils are very strange, very rare and very hard to find," Salas told The Associated Press.
The cranium discovered in Peru is 16 inches long and is believed to be 8 million to 10 million years old, based on the age of the rock bed in which it was found.
"Rarely are any bones of these gigantic, marine birds found fossilized uncrushed, and to find an uncrushed skull of this size is very significant," said Ken Campbell, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.
Campbell, who examined photos of the find but was not involved in the dig, said he knows of "no specimen of comparable quality." Dan Kepska, a paleontology researcher at North Carolina State University who also was not part of the project, agreed that the skull is the most complete ever reported.
He called the birds "one of the great enigmas of avian paleontology."
With fossils discovered in North America, North Africa and even Antarctica, Kepska said, the birds were ubiquitous only a few million years before humans evolved and scientists puzzle over why they died out. Some believe they are related to gannets and pelicans, while other say they are related to ducks.
Campbell said the Peru find "will undoubtedly be of great importance to our understanding of these gigantic birds, and it will help clarify the relationships of the other fossil pelagornithids found in the Pisco Formation."
The formation, a coastal rock bed south of the capital, Lima, is known for yielding fossils of whales, dolphins, turtles and other marine life dating as far back as 14 million years.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2009-02-28 10:10:33

Small, Hot Earth-Like Planet Discovered
Space.com
posted: 24 DAYS 9 HOURS AGOcomments: 700filed under: Science NewsPrintShareText SizeAAASkip over this content

(Feb. 3) - What may be the smallest extrasolar planet, measuring less than twice the size of Earth, has been discovered orbiting a sun-like star.
The world is far hotter than ours, however. And controversy over the size claim has heated up, too. Astronomers used the COROT space telescope (a mission led by the French Space Agency, and also involving the European Space Agency and others) to detect the new planet as it transited its parent star, dimming the light from the star as it passed in front of it. The host star is located 457 light-years from Earth, where one light-year is the distance light will travel in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.
"For the first time, we have unambiguously detected a planet that is 'rocky' in the same sense as our own Earth," said Malcolm Fridlund, ESA's COROT Project Scientist. "We now have to understand this object further to put it into context, and continue our search for smaller, more Earth-like objects with COROT."
He added, "This discovery is a very important step on the road to understanding the formation and evolution of our planet."
Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at MIT who was not involved in the discovery said, "My first thought is that it's extremely exciting because we've been waiting to find a planet that we can really call rocky. I would just caution that more information, more data, is needed."
For instance, the discovery has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, and not much information about the planet has been released by COROT scientists. Seager says in order to confirm an exoplanet is rocky, scientists need to nail down its mass and radius (or the combination of size and density, or mass and density).
"It looks like the mass is not well-determined and so that's why they're saying they're not sure what the density is," Seager told SPACE.com. "They think it is terrestrial-like. It might have water ice, or it might have rocks, but it's certainly not a gas giant." COROT scientists estimate the planet ranges from 5.7 to 11 Earth masses.
Hot discovery
One big difference in the newfound planet compared to Earth: COROT-Exo-7b is located very close to its star, orbiting once every 20 hours. Its temperature is so high, ranging from 1,832 to 2,732 degrees Fahrenheit that the researchers say the exoplanet could be covered in lava or water vapor. The density of the planet is still under investigation, though scientists say it may be rocky like Earth and covered in liquid lava. COROT-Exo-7b may also belong to a class of planets that are thought to be made up of water and rock in almost equal amounts. Given the high temperatures measured, the planet would likely be a very hot and humid place.
"Finding such a small planet was not a complete surprise," said Daniel Rouan, researcher at the Observatoire de Paris Lesia, who coordinates the project with Alain Leger, from Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale. "COROT-Exo-7b belongs to a class of objects whose existence had been predicted for some time." Small and odd
Very few of the more than 300 exoplanets found so far have a mass comparable to that of Earth and the other terrestrial planets — Venus, Mars and Mercury. That's because terrestrial planets are extremely difficult to detect.
Of the Earth-like planets detected, this is the first one spotted using the so-called transit method, which can yield both the planet's mass and radius. Other methods just reveal the planet's mass, Seager said.
The newfound planet's size status is also questioned. When astronomers study planets, they're interested in both mass and diameter.
"The claim that it is the 'smallest exoplanet' found to date is not correct," said planet-formation theorist Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "It is the smallest mass exoplanet found to date that transits, but other hot super-Earths have been found that do not transit but have lower masses." Boss was not involved in the current discovery.
For instance, he adds Gliese 876 d has "a minimum mass of 5.9 Earth masses and a best estimate for the true mass of 7.5 Earth masses."
Most of the methods used so far are indirect and sensitive to the mass of the planet, which is why bigger worlds are easier to detect. COROT can directly measure the size of a planet's surface, which is an advantage to astronomers. In addition, because the probe is in space, it has longer periods of uninterrupted observation than from the ground.
The internal structure of COROT-Exo-7b particularly puzzles scientists, as they are unsure whether it is an "ocean planet," a kind of planet whose existence has never been proved so far. In theory, such planets would initially be covered partially in ice, and they would later drift toward their star, with the ice melting to cover it in liquid. © Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
2009-02-03 15:49:34

Posts I Forgot

World's Oldest Prehistoric Axes Unearthed By JULIA ZAPPEI, AP
posted: 28 DAYS 8 HOURS AGOcomments: 555filed under: World NewsPrintShareText SizeAAAKUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (Jan. 30) - Malaysian archeologists have unearthed prehistoric stone axes that they said Friday were the world's oldest at about 1.8 million years old.
Seven axes were found with other tools at an excavation site in Malaysia's northern Perak state in June, and tests by a Tokyo laboratory indicate they were about 1.83 million years old, said Mokhtar Saidin, director of the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Science Malaysia.
The group released their conclusions Thursday, and other archeologists have not yet examined the results.
"It's really the first time we have such evidence (dating back) 1.83 million years," Mokhtar said, adding that the oldest axes previously discovered were 1.6 million years old in Africa.
However, other chopping tools, as well as human remains, have been found in Africa that are much older, with some dating back 4 million years, he said.
Geochronology Japan Inc., a lab in Tokyo, calculated the age of the tools by analyzing the rock that covered them, Mokhtar said. The result has a margin of error of 610,000 years, he said.
Some previous discoveries have suggested there were humans in Southeast Asia up to 1.9 million years ago, but those have been disputed, said Harry Truman Simanjuntak, a researcher at the National Research Center of Archaeology in Jakarta.
Simanjuntak cautioned that others still need to investigate claims about the axes' age.
The oldest previous evidence of human existence in Malaysia was stone tools dating back about 200,000 years, found at the same excavation site in Perak.
The archeologists are trying to find human bone remains in Perak, Mokhtar said, but stressed that it might be unlikely because of decay due to warm, humid climate conditions. The oldest bones found in Perak so far have only been about 10,000 years old.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2009-01-30 07:47:52

Ancient Whales Gave Birth on Land By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer, LiveScience
posted: 22 DAYS 18 HOURS AGOcomments: 584filed under: Science NewsPrintShareText SizeAAASkip over this content

(Feb. 4) -- More than 47 million years ago, a whale was about to give birth to her young ... on land. That's according to skeletal remains of a pregnant cetacean whose fetus was positioned head-down as is the case for land mammals but not aquatic whales.
The teeth of the fetus were so well-developed that researchers who analyzed the fossils think the baby would have been born within days, had its mom not died.
The fossil discovery marks the first extinct whale and fetus combination known to date, shedding light on the lifestyle of ancient whales as they made the transition from land to sea during the Eocene Epoch (between 54.8 million and 33.7 million years ago).
Philip Gingerich, a paleontologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and his team discovered the pregnant whale remains in Pakistan in 2000, and then in 2004, Gingerich's co-authors and others found the nearly complete skeleton of an adult male from the same species in those fossil beds. The adult whales are each about 8.5 feet long and weighed between 615 and 860 pounds, though the male was slightly longer and heavier than the female.
(Gingerich is also director of the University of Michigan's Museum of Paleontology.)
On the dig that ultimately yielded the pregnant whale, Gingerich and his team first spotted what looked like a line of chalk on the ground surface, which later turned out to be the teeth of the whale fetus.
"Very quickly I got into the baby's teeth," Gingerich told LiveScience. "Then I kept going around it, and the ribs seemed too big for the size of the animal and they were all going the wrong way. So I have to say I spent the whole day excavating this thing confused about what in the world was going on here."
Soon after, Gingeric discovered another, larger, skull, and he realized the fetus was still inside its mother.The new species, now called Maiacetus inuus, is a member of the Archaeoceti, a group of cetaceans (an animal group that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises) that predate modern toothed and baleen whales. Archaeocetes had mouths full of several types of teeth, as well as nostrils near the nose tip. Both features are seen in land mammals but not in today's whales.
Like other archaeocetes, the newly discovered whale was equipped with four legs modified for foot-powered swimming (sort of like climbing, or scrambling, up a steep hill but instead in water). While the whales likely could support their weight on their flipper-like limbs, they probably couldn't go far on land.
"They clearly were tied to the shore," Gingerich said. "They were living at the land-sea interface and going back and forth."
The team suggests that Maiacetus fed at sea and came ashore to rest, mate and give birth.
The head-first position of the fetus matches what is found in many land animals, particularly the artiodactyls (pigs, deer and cows), which are thought to have given rise to ancient whales. Human babies also emerge head first, ideally.
Scientists speculate that a head-first orientation allows land mammals to breathe even if they get stuck in the birth canal.
That's not the case underwater. "If you're born in the water you don't want the head out away from the mother until it's going to pop free, because you don't want it to drown,” Gingerich said.
In addition, tail-first delivery in modern whales and dolphins would ensure the baby is facing in the same direction as its mother who is likely swimming. To keep mom and baby from getting separated, tail-first delivery would be optimal, Gingerich said.
The research, published in the Feb. 4 issue of the online journal PloS ONE, was funded by the Geological Survey of Pakistan, National Geographic Society, National Science Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. © Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
2009-02-04 12:52:41

Dinosaur "Dance Floor" Found

Huge Field of Dinosaur Tracks Found

By LiveScience Staff, LiveScience
posted: 2 HOURS 40 MINUTES AGOcomments: 93filed under: Science News

(Oct. 20) - More than 1,000 dinosaur footprints along with tail-drag marks have been discovered along the Arizona-Utah border. The incredibly rare concentration of beastly tracks likely belonged to at least four different species of dinosaurs, ranging from youngsters to adults.

The tracks range in length from 1 to 20 inches.
"The different size tracks may tell us that we are seeing mothers walking around with babies," said researcher Winston Seiler, a geologist at the University of Utah.
The tracks were laid about 190 million years ago in what is now the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument.
"There must have been more than one kind of dinosaur there," said researcher Marjorie Chan, professor and chair of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah. "It was a place that attracted a crowd, kind of like a dance floor."
While the site is covered in sand dunes now, the researchers say the tracks are within what was a network of wet, low watering holes between the dunes. In fact, the tracks provide more evidence of wet intervals during the Early Jurassic Period, when the U.S. Southwest was covered with a field of sand dunes larger than the Sahara Desert.

Chan and her colleagues, including Seiler, described the dinosaur track site in the October issue of the international paleontology journal Palaios.
By studying the shapes and sizes of the tracks, Seiler suggests four dinosaur species gathered at the watering hole, though the researchers have yet to match the prints with specific species. Currently, the tracks are named for their particular shapes and include:
-- Eubrontes footprints measure 10 to 16 inches long and have three toes and a heel. These tracks likely were made by upright-walking dinosaurs with a body length of 16 to 20 feet, or smaller than Tyrannosaurus rex.

-- Grallator tracks are about 4 to 7 inches long, are three-toed and were left by small dinosaurs only a few feet tall.
-- Sauropodomorph tracks, more circular than the other types, were left by creatures that walked on four legs and were the largest dinosaurs at the site. Their tracks range from 6 to 11 inches long. Seiler said the tail-drag marks are associated with these circular footprints, so they likely were made by sauropods.
-- Anchisauripus tracks measure 7 to 10 inches long and were made by dinosaurs that ranged from 6 to 13 feet in length.

Numerous dinosaur track sites have been found in the western United States and elsewhere around the world. For instance, tracks from a herd of 11 giant sauropod dinosaurs were discovered in the ancient coastal mudflats of Yemen. But the new discovery is rare in the density of tracks.
"Unlike other trackways that may have several to dozens of footprint impressions, this particular surface has more than 1,000," Seiler and Chan write.
Chan first visited the site of the dinosaur tracks in 2005 with a U.S. Bureau of Land Management ranger who was puzzled by them. Chan initially called them potholes, which are erosion features common in desert sandstone. "But I knew that wasn't the whole story because of the high concentration and because they weren't anywhere else nearby but along that one surface."
One unnamed reviewer of the Palaios study still believes the holes are erosion features, according to a statement released today by the University of Utah.
In 2006, Seiler saw the tracks and had similar thoughts. "At first glance, they look like weathering pits — a field of odd potholes," he said. "But within about five minutes of wandering around, I realized these were dinosaur footprints."
© Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
2008-10-20 15:09:13

Oldest 'Footprints' on Earth Found

Related to the post: Storm Uncovers Fossil in Scientist's Yard---here's a second article related to the first by way of the subject of fossils and paleontology:

Oldest 'Footprints' on Earth Found LiveScience
posted: 2 DAYS 5 HOURS AGOcomments: 958filed under: Science NewsPrintShareText SizeAAA

(Oct. 5) - The oldest-known tracks of a creature apparently using legs have been discovered in rock dated to 570 million years ago in what was once a shallow sea in Nevada.
Scientists think land beasts evolved from ancient creatures that left the sea and evolved lungs and legs. If the new finding is real — the discoverer says will fuel skepticism — it pushes the advent of walking back 30 million years earlier than any previous solid finding.
The aquatic creature left its "footprints" as two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters in diameter. Scientists said today that the animal must have stepped lightly onto the soft marine sediment, because its legs only pressed shallow pinpoints into that long-ago sea bed.

The tracks were made during what is called the Ediacaran period, which preceded the Cambrian period, the time when most major groups of animals first evolved. Scientists had once thought only microbes and simple multicellular animals that existed prior to the Cambrian, but that notion is changing, said Ohio State University Professor Loren Babcock.

"We keep talking about the possibility of more complex animals in the Ediacaran — soft corals, some arthropods, and flatworms — but the evidence has not been totally convincing," Babcock said. "But if you find evidence, like we did, of an animal with legs — an animal walking around — then that makes the possibility much more likely."
Soo-Yeun Ahn, a doctoral student at Ohio State, presented the discovery today at a meeting of the Geological Society of America.
Babcock was surveying rocks in the mountains near Goldfield, Nevada, with Hollingsworth in 2000 when he found the tracks.

"This was truly an accidental discovery," he said. "We came on an outcrop that looked like it crossed the Precambrian-Cambrian boundary, so we stopped to take a look at it. We just sat down and started flipping rocks over. We were there less than an hour when I saw it."
Little can be gleaned about what sort of creature it was, but Babcock "reasonably certain — not 100 percent" that it was an arthropod, such as one resembling a centipede or millipede, or by a leg-bearing worm. It might have been about one as wide as a pencil and may have had multiple, spindly legs.
In 2002, other researchers reported a similar fossil trail from Canada that dated back to the middle of the Cambrian period, about 520 million years ago. Another set of tracks found in South China date back to 540 million years ago. At approximately 570 million years old, this new fossil not only provides the earliest suggestion of animals walking on legs, but it also shows that complex animals were alive on earth before the Cambrian.
"I expect that there will be a lot of skepticism," Babcock said about the discovery. "There should be. But I think it will cause some excitement. And it will probably cause some people to look harder at the rocks they already have. Sometimes it's just a matter of thinking differently about the same specimen."
© Imaginova Corp. All rights reserved.
2008-10-05 15:19:49

Storm Uncovers Fossil in Scientist's Yard

Storm Uncovers Fossil in Scientist's Yard AP
posted: 4 DAYS 20 HOURS AGOcomments: 207filed under: Hurricane News, Science NewsPrintShareText SizeAAACAPLEN, Texas (Oct. 3) - A paleontologist whose beachfront home in Texas was destroyed during Hurricane Ike has found a football-size tooth in the debris.
Dorothy Sisk and Jim Westgate are scientists at Lamar University. They discovered the fossil tooth in the front yard of Sisk's home in Caplen on the devastated Bolivar Peninsula. Westgate believes the fossil is from a Columbian mammoth common in North America until around 10,000 years ago.
The tooth looks like a series of boot soles or slices of bread wedged together. It is expected to be sent to the Texas Memorial Museum in Austin.
“This is the first one I’ve found in 19 years,” Westgate is quoted on the Lamar University Web site. “People bring in pieces and parts from the beach for me to identify, and I haven’t seen one in this good a condition."
The official location of the fossil will be recorded as Sisk's address, Westgate told the university.
"Normally we don’t have house addresses for our fossil localities,” he said.
More than 1 million people fled the Texas coast because of Hurricane Ike.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2008-10-02 21:16:31

---obviously Ike was pretty bad, but this is interesting.