Oldest Fossils Discovered

From an article in Science Daily - a team from the University of Western Australia and Oxford University has discovered Earth's oldest fossils. From the article:

• The microscopic fossils show convincing evidence for cells and bacteria living in an oxygen-free world over 3.4 billion years ago.

According to the science team:

• we (now) have good solid evidence (that) life (existed) over 3.4 billion years ago. It confirms there were bacteria at this time, living without oxygen.
  

The early environment was far from idyllic. Volcanic activity dominating the early Earth. The sky was cloudy and grey, keeping the heat inolcanic activity dominating the early Earth. The sky was cloudy and grey, keeping the heat in.

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Nemesis not to blame for mass extinctions

We have all heard that the fossil records show a curious cycle of every 27 million years, Earth has been bombarded so heavily as to cause a mass extinction. Some scientists blamed a star dubbed Nemesis. In a recent IO9 article, Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas and Richard Bambach of Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, say that the theory that every 27 million years, Nemesis would swing through the outer system bringing with it vast quantities of material from the Ort cloud. Melott and Bambach researched the fossil records and indeed found an extremely accurate record of mass extinctions every 27 million years, further back than anyone else had researched. And that accuracy it appears, is the failing point of the Nemesis as the cause. Because the occurrences are SO regular it can not be a Nemesis object, because it is SO regular!

Melott and Bambach postulate that if Sol had a binary companion, their shared orbit around a common central point would distort the regularity of each body around the system. This means that each time Nemesis swung in, its orbit would change and the occurrence would not and could not be the same as the one before and the one after. The change might be subtle but it would be enough for the regularity of the events to be wildly different instead of every 27 million.

You can read the whole article on IO9 here

Researchers find primate "missing link"

Scientists have discovered a primate fossil that they believe forms a crucial "missing link" between our own evolutionary branch of life and the rest of the animal kingdom. The 47 million year old primate fossil may well be to understanding early stages of primate evolution.

The skeleton is 95% complete and is so well preserved that it is possible to see individual hairs covering its' body and even the make-up of the animal's final meal. The fossil's amazing preservation means that the scientific team has managed to glean a huge amount of information from it. Researchers believe it comes from the time when the primate lineage, that diversified into monkeys, apes and ultimately humans, split from a separate group that went on to become lemurs and other less well known species.

The real excitement comes from the fact that this specimen is not on the lemur line because it lacks two key characteristics shared by lemurs – a grooming claw on her second toe and a fused set of teeth called a tooth comb. Also, a bone in her ankle called the talus is shaped like members of our branch of the primates. So the researchers believe she may be on our evolutionary line dating from just after the split with the lemurs.

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Tyrannosaurus Chicken?

Tyrannosaurus Rex or for that matter Dinosaur are fast becoming misnomers. It would appear that Tyrannosaurus Chicken is far closer to being true according to a new study. Chickens and dinosaurs may have more in common than was previously thought after researchers discovered close ties between the two creatures. The link between the bird and the Tyrannosaurus Rex has been revealed in a protein study dating back 88million years. Scientists from Harvard University discovered the link between chickens and the T-Rex when they analyzed the structure of tiny shreds of collagen taken from a fossilized dinosaur bone. Scientists were able to establish the relationship with a relatively high degree of confidence. The study determined that the fearsome dinosaur was closer to a chicken than a modern alligator. Yes, go ahead and say it....Chicken Rex

Are birds older than dinosaurs? New evidence!

A new analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, the Centre for Biodiversity Conservation Mexico and Central America, and Boston University offers the strongest molecular evidence yet for an ancient origin of modern birds, suggesting that they arose more than 100 million years ago, not 60 million years ago, as fossils suggest. The question is at the center of a "rocks versus clocks" debate between paleontologists, whose estimates are based on the fossil record, and scientists who use "molecular clock" methods to study evolutionary history. Fossil record contains physical remains of ancient organisms, hence the"rock" analogy. Molecular genetic data or the "clock" method relies on the observation that although mutations occur at random in the genome, when looked at over long stretches of time they occur (or "tick") at a fairly constant rate. However, the two approaches have yielded conflicting results. Both camps insist that the other's data is incomplete.

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