Paleontology in the News

This is a selection of stories, subject to the following rules. First, I don't guarantee close daily coverage of everything that happens (because I have things to do apart from maintaining this Web page). Second, the site has to be generally accessible. (Many journals, like Science and Nature, make new papers accessible only to people or institutions who have paid a subscription to the written version.) Third, I choose newspapers and news sites that tend to keep their pages accessible for more than two weeks over those that do not. Fourth, I keep older articles archived for varying lengths of time, depending how important I think they are (or interesting, at least); whether they have been updated or made redundant; and whether the site has dropped them. For example, I've had to limit stories from the New York Times. It is a fine paper, but its new policy is to take off its stories within DAYS and then charge for access to them. I'll attach a notice to each item which says, This won't last long on free access (with free registration). If you want to keep this, DOWNLOAD IT NOW!

Similar pages on my web site are

and Here is a site for Anthropology in the News from Texas A & M University.

Paleontology in the News

  • May 15, 2008. Climbing is as easy as walking, if you are a small primate. (If I remember correctly, it's the same for squirrels.) National Geographic News

  • May 13, 2008. Intelligent beings created by God could exist in outer space (says the Vatican!). You can't make up headlines like this! BBC News OnLine

  • May 8, 2008. More information about the people living at Monte Verde, in southern Chile, about 14,000 years ago. The paper is in Science.

  • May 7, 2008. The platypus genome.

  • May 6, 2008. Eoconfuciusornis, a new Cretaceous bird from China. There is a maddening lack of information in this news piece, based on an article in a Chinese journal. National Geographic News

  • May 3, 2008. The Deccan Trap eruptions across the KT boundary were very rapid and therefore had dramatic pulsed environmental effects. The paper is in JGR, and I haven't read it: but here is the abstract. JGR abstract

  • May 2, 2008. The teeth of Paranthropus boisei. They are big and imposing, with thick enamel, and have been interpreted by almost everyone as signs of a diet that included very tough material. BUT microscopic examination of the microwear on well-preserved teeth shows no signs of the characteristic wear marks that should be there. So these individuals were eating foods a lot softer than we thought. One possible explanation (favored by the authors) is that the teeth were adapted for eating tough hard foods, but only in a food crisis. After all, natural selection would reward survival in a crisis: though it means that animals may be selected for something that doesn't reflect their everyday lives. The science reporters are talking about challenges to ideas on evolution, but that's eye-catching nonsense. This phenomenon is quite a common sort of thing, actually: pronghorn antelope are adapted to run very fast, but they only do that once in a while (in an emergency). Of course, this makes you wonder about all sorts of functional interpretations of fossil creatures doing this or that, whereas you'd very likely not catch them at it if you visited them in a time machine. But there's no rule that says observing and interpreting evolutionary patterns has to be easy. The paper is on open access in PLoS One.

  • May 1, 2008. The magical allure of a dinosaur coprolite. BBC News Online

  • May 1, 2008. Cambrian food webs. The paper is freely available on PLoS Biology. There may be a lot of modelling based on not much real data. Elizabeth Pennisi of Science calles it a "daring analysis." Terra Daily

  • April 26, 2008. No wildfire at the K-T boundary. Some of you know that I have blasted this idea in every edition of History of Life. Now some real science, rather than just logic, shows that the wildfire hypothesis is unnecessary. The reference is Harvey, M. C., et al. 2008. Combustion of fossil organic matter at the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-P) boundary. Geology 36: 355-358. But Geology does not put its papers on the Web for general access. The carbon particles at the K-T boundary most likely were produced in the impact from a giant oil field next to the Chicxulub crater, and spread globally in the impact cloud: no fires. All the evidence is explained better by this idea than by the wildfire idea, which becomes redundant. I will keep looking for a Web reference to this paper.

  • April 25, 2008. Praying mantis found in Cretaceous amber from Japan. They should take it to Grenoble (see story from April 4, 2008). National Geographic News

  • April 24, 2008. Human genetics in ancient African populations. The paper is allegedly in the American Journal of Human Genetics (I couldn't find it yesterday). National Geographic News

  • April 21, 2008. Life began near hot vents, says Mike Russell. Warning: this is an in-house interview in NASA's Astrobiology magazine. It's an opinion piece rather than science.

  • April 21, 2008. Very rapid evolution in a small population of lizards on an Adriatic island. The principle of potentially rapid evolution in small populations is well established. This is a neat example. A web comment I read pointed out that some of the changes might be environmentally induced, so that the genetic component might be less than it seems. That seems reasonable, but the genetic component must nevertheless be very high. Nice study. The paper is said to be in PNAS last month, but I don't remember seeing it! National Geographic News

  • April 14, 2008. "Oldest living tree" found in Sweden: estimated at 9,550 years old. Well, it's cheating a bit. Norway spruces apparently can re-sprout from the roots when the old (above-ground) part of the tree dies. So it's a bit of an act of faith that the current tree sprouted from the old radiocarbon roots. If that logic is correct, then creosote bushes in Lucerne Valley in the Mojave desert of Southern California may be as old or older, because they too can propagate from existing roots ( National Park Service. Even so, this is a good story. National Geographic News

  • April 14, 2008. Moeritherium, a proboscidean from the Fayum, was a swamp-dweller. It's always looked like that, from the make-up of the Fayum fossil fauna. But this new isotope research supports the inference. National Geographic News.

  • April 11, 2008. Death of a baby mammoth. National Geographic News

  • April 10, 2008. New smaller estimate for the size of the KT asteroid. I don't believe it. The older estimates were based on size of the Chicxulub crater, and frm summing the iridium found in >100 sites. The new estimate is based on much less data, and on less well established assumptions. National Geographic News

  • April 10, 2008. What we don't know about clouds and paleoclimate. This wasn't the intent of the article, but that is what it shows us. If cloud effects can make a large difference in paleoclimate estimates, and we don't understand the processes or the inputs very well, then paleoclimate estimates are still inspired guesses (as they always have been). We're making progress, but we're not there yet! National Geographic News

  • April 10, 2008. Another fine piece of X-ray tomography from the Europeans: a snake with legs. We knew about the snake: the fidelity of the imagery is what's new. BBC News. Previous story on the technique: April 4, 2008

  • April 8, 2008. Very old stone tools found in remote northwest Australia. National Geographic News

  • April 7, 2008. A lung-less frog, for your bizarre adaptations file. National Geographic News

  • April 7, 2008. The chirality in Earth's life came from space, delivered in pre-biotic meteorite impacts. Terra Daily

  • April 4, 2008. Insects in Cretaceous amber revealed in astonishing detail. This is a wonderful breakthrough in studying amber. The imagery is 3-D and astounding in its fidelity. The implications for paleobiology are amazing. Plane-loads of paleontologists are no doubt racing to Grenoble to get in on the action.

  • April 3, 2008. Pre-Clovis human coprolite found in Oregon. I didn't see the paper in Science, so it must be in press...

  • April 1, 2008. What killed off the mammoths? Climate change AND humans. The paper is in PLos Biology, which is open-access on the Web, and it looks convincing to me. National Geographic News

  • March 26, 2008. The oldest Homo in Europe. This is from the Atapuerca site in Spain and is probably about a million years old. Let's wait and see how the naming works out: the Spanish think it is Homo antecessor. The BBC site has a useful diagram for keeping track of the incrasingly branched history of Homo species through time. The paper is in Nature, so it won't be freely available on the Web.

  • March 25, 2008. The complex Ediacaran animal Funisia. The paper was in Science last week, and will be freely available on the Web in a few months. Terra Daily

  • March 24, 2008. The oldest vegetarian lizard? from the Cretaceous of Japan. It's a stretch to make this a Significant Breakthrough. There are plenty of vegetarians in the fossil record before this lizard. And why it had to eat angiosperms rather than any other plants is incomprehensible. In fact, THE AUTHORS DON'T SAY THAT: they specifically discuss it and say that angiosperms were too rare to be a stable food source for these lizards, which surely ate gymnosperms instead. All the guff about abominable mysteries and shedding light on angiosperm origins is pure nonsense. The question is where did it come from? It is a reporter trying to make a splash with the story, or it is an author trying to make a splash with the story? Either way, the end result is a bizarrely distorted news report. Whatever else might have happened, it's clear that THE REPORTER DIDN'T READ THE PAPER. National Geographic News

  • March 24, 2008. Permian extinction and toxic gases. Maybe I'm being particularly thick today, but from this story I can't tell what the results of this study are. The paper is in press in Nature Geoscience. I think it says that hydrogen sulfide wasn't the killer gas, and it didn't destroy the ozone layer. It doesn't say that the oceans didn't go anoxic, and it doesn't say that gases didn't set off the extinction (by other pathways).

  • March 18, 2008. Dakota, the mummified duckbill dinosaur. AP story, National Geographic News

  • March 17, 2008. Humans and Neanderthals diverged maybe 300,000 to 400,000 years ago. The paper is in PNAS. The date is a bit more sloppy than that, but that's the most likely window. Two comments. First, there is growing evidence that humans and Neanderthals remained interfertile, so that would affect the result to some extent (it would push it back). Second, the analysis assumes there was no natural selection, only genetic drift. I don't believe that assumption for a millisecond: the question is whether one can blithely ignore it. The answer is that you can blithely ignore it if you want to make a splash in PNAS! And on National Geographic News! National Geographic News

  • March 17, 2008. Ice Age hand axes dredged from the bed of the North Sea.

  • March 12, 2008. Pterosaurs had a life history like dinosaurs. National Geographic News

  • March 11, 2008. Cretaceous feathers in amber. Unfortunately, we don't know what animal they came from: dinosaur? or bird? So I didn't report on them when the news came out last month. However, there's a nice image here. National Geographic News

  • March 10, 2008. Bones from (very) small humans found on Palau. A long and well-written story. It's anybody's guess at the moment how these humans relate to the small people of Flores. The paper is in PLoS One. The authors describe the Palau specimens rather sketchily, and have not even looked at those from Flores, so it is difficult to see how they can have any credibility in suggesting that the Flores people are also Homo sapiens.

  • March 6, 2008. New Eocene bats from the Fayum, in Egypt. For the details, which really matter, we shall have to wait for the paper, forthcoming in JVP. National Geographic News

  • March 3, 2008. Earliest North American primate. The new species of Teilhardina dates from the short-lived and dramatically warm period at the end of the Eocene, when sea level dropped, climate warmed, and mammals exchanged across North America and Eurasia through regions that had been too cold for them previously. The paper is said to be in PNAS "this week": it isn't, of course, but it is in press. National Geographic News

  • February 28, 2008. Cannibalism may have wiped out Neanderthals. Bloody nonsense! Even if the premise was true, and that cannibal Neanderthals actually carried kuru or something like it, all it takes is for one population to quit cannibalism, and all will be well. Homo sapiens is only occasionally a cannibal, and there's no reason to suppose that Neanderthals from Central Asia to Gibraltar were all, uniformly, cannibals. And after having said all that, remember that the Fore did not die out from their cannibalism either. Kuru was so slow that mostly older, post-reproductive individuals died from it.

  • February 28, 2008. Kevin Padian on teaching evolution. Short, concise, well-written opinion piece on the problem and its solution. Geotimes, February 2008

  • February 27, 2008. Huge pliosaur found in Spitsbergen. It may or may not be the "sea reptile biggest on record". The length is extrapolated from one flipper, and teeth the size of cucumbers (there's science reporting for you)! Even so, 15 meters is impressive!

  • February 21, 2008. New genetic data on human dispersal. The results are in line with what we already know. But with such a large data set, the results are more firmly established. National Geographic News

  • February 18, 2008. A giant frog from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Once again, the claim is made that it is in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy. Well, as usual, it isn't. I wish they wouldn't do that!!!! [It finally appeared on February 26]. National Geographic News.

  • February 18, 2008. Potentially habitable planets are common (says the headline). Don't forget, this is ENTIRELY speculation. Believe it if you like.... National Geographic News

  • February 15, 2008. Mars has been too salty for life for (at least) 4 billion years. BBC News

  • February 14, 2008. New take on human arrival in the Americas. Briefly, the new reconstruction suggests a long occupation of Beringia before the final migration into the great land mass of North America. The paper is said to be on free access in PLoS One. Terra Daily

  • February 13, 2008. The most basal bat so far found: it flew but did not have echolocation. The paper is in Nature, and is quite convincing; but Nature does not make its papers generally available on the Web. See Carl Zimmer's blog for two great images.

  • February 13, 2008. Two more strange Cretaceous theropods from Africa. The paper is in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

  • February 11, 2008. New Cretaceous hadrosaur found in Mexico. National Geographic News

  • February 11, 2008. A new small Cretaceous pterosaur from China. The paper is said to be in PNAS today.

  • February 11, 2008. A cyanobacterium that invented chlorophyll d: a molecule that harvests energy from red light that is so close to infra-red that we can't see it. The cyanobacterium is symbiotic with a sea squirt on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, living under the body of the sea squirt. I'll try to find out whether the sea squirt itself is red: many are. This is not paleontology, but it is significant evolutionary biology! Terra Daily

  • February 8, 2008. Crayfish and plate tectonics.

  • February 8, 2008. Life evolved in freezing water. Very good article in Discover magazine reviewing the life-began-in cold water arguments (and evidence). National Geographic News

  • February 1, 2008. The fearsome killing bite of the extinct Australian marsupial Thylacoleo. A study by Stephen Wroe is an advanced analysis that supports previous studies. The paper is in the Journal of Zoology, and it's really convincing!

  • January 31, 2008. Oldest "horseshoe crab" reported, from the late Ordovician of Canada. It is not a limulid, but is the earliest known xiphosuran. (Other, more distantly related, fossils are known from the early Cambrian.) It does underline the "living fossil" nature of the living Limulus. The paper is in Palaeontology. National Geographic News

  • January 24, 2008. New information and speculation on the K-T asteroid. Who knows when we'll see the actual paper.

  • January 23, 2008. A more complete concise statement of the WAIR hypothesis from Ken Dial and colleagues. The paper is in Nature today. I still don't believe it: they are describing a complex and fascinating feature of the flight of extant birds that has nothing to do with the origin of bird flight (unless you use special pleading). But I will postpone full comment until I have read the full paper.