Ahead of their time

Seems there was a race of super-geniuses. Discovered in South Africa in 1913, fossil skulls showed a brain capacity bigger than modern humans. Not only that, but:

These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood. This phenomenon is sometimes used to explain rapid evolutionary changes. For example, certain amphibians retain fishlike gills even when fully mature and past their water-inhabiting period. Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates.Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

Why did they die out? Without more information, scientists can only speculate:

Perhaps, though, it also made the Boskops excessively internal and self-reflective. With their perhaps astonishing insights, they may have become a species of dreamers with an internal mental life literally beyond anything we can imagine.

...

Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Perhaps they were prisoners of those majestic brains.

Wonder what they would say about life today?

Time to rewrite the textbooks again

It appears that all those books, movies, illustrations, etc. showing dinosaurs as big, scaly creatures will have to go in the trash. The discovery of a new dinosaur, Tianyulong confuciusi, by Chinese researchers led by Xiao-Ting Zheng could possibly remodel conventional wisdom regarding the body covering of dinosaurs

Anybody who has looked at a dinosaur picture book more than once in childhood can remember dinosaurs in all their myriad shapes as having scaly or armor-plated skin. Over the last few decades, the discoveries of theropods, meat-eating dinosaurs with evidence of feathers has brought the idea of theropods covered in a coat of feathers. The early horned dinosaurs, psittacosaurs, left fossils with apparent quills over the back and tail. That was it for covering.

Until now. Tianyulong was found with impressions that resemble the proto-feathers of early theropods. One problem. Tianyulong was a heterodontosaur, an early branch on the tree on the other side of the main split; the Saurischia-Ornithischia division. That means all of the families of dinosaurs might have had some sort of covering at some point in their history. They might have been fuzzy or furry or downright shaggy.

Illustrators are going to have a field day.

Image by Xing Li-Da.

From cold to hot: more cool palaeo stuff.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

You've heard about the Ice Ages. Ten thousand to a million years ago. Glaciers, mammoths, Raquel Welch in a fur bikini. Pshh. Big deal. A few big glaciers and what did we get out of it? Igloos? Let's go back to the real ice age. The Cryogenian period. 850-630 million years ago. The Earth got so cold that it might have frozen completely over. A global hockey rink.

As cold as it was on the surface, things were happening underneath. A new paper announces the discovery of the oldest animals yet, sponges that date back 635 million years. Fossil imprints weren't actually found, rather there were deposits of steroids (Barry Bonds was alive back then?) in the rock left behind from the sponges' tissue. It appears that all that cold may have had a hand in changing the chemistry of the oceans, introducing  more oxygen in the system, allowing single-cell organisms, who had already been around for a couple billion years, the energy to evolve into complex multicellular organisms.

Credit: Copyright Jason Bourque, University of Florida

I can't feel my toes. Let's put our shorts on and hop in the time machine to the Paleocene epoch, 65.5-55.8 million years ago, right after that big rock plowed into the Yucatan and finished the dinosaurs off. After the evolutionary party that was the Mesozoic, the earth had had about enough of thunder lizards and wanted peace and quiet while it slept off its hangover. The mammals, which had evolved while trying not to get stepped on by dinosaurs, now had the run of the place. The world was like a kid's TV show, populated by small, furry creatures. That's what I always thought, anyway.

Like anything else, just as you think it's safe.... For one thing, it was hot as fuck, smoggy from forest fires and muggy. Little mammals still had to watch out, because there were snakes 45 feet long that could swallow something as big as a cow. Stalking the underbrush were sebecosuchans; big, fast crocodiles that could run like hell. Nervous and sweaty, our ancestors in the Paleocene didn't have the post-dinosaurian kumbaya that I thought.

A few other recent goodies: New evidence that proto-whales with feet still gave birth on land, a revelation on the origin of claws in arthropods, and our ancestors had jaws of steel.

New revelations of the past

The tree of life may need a fundamental reorganization according to a new paper from the American Museum of Natural History. The writers state that the "lower" orders of animal life, like jellyfish and sponges comprise their own branch on the tree and evolved a nervous system independently. Image Credit: AMNH

The Open Source Palaeontologist has a new paper on combat among ceratopsian dinosaurs, using fossil wounds to reconstruct ancient battles among horned dinosaurs. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Will there ever be coal forests again?

Probably not. That's the prediction over at The Dragon's Tales. It's a nice overview of the ecology of the Carboniferous Period. If you've ever wondered where our fossil fuels come from and whether any more is being made, check it out. In short, There just weren't enough creepy-crawlies to burrow through the coal forest detritus and eat it. Surprising, since the Carboniferous was the Golden Age of creepy-crawlies. Some of them were bigger than we are. The article is part of the Boneyard, the great monthly gathering of palaeontology posts. The latest one is at When Pigs Fly Returns.

Family tree of cats

If you've ever wondered how closely related your cat is to the king of beasts, The World We Don't Live In has a post that shows the tree, and typical of cats, shows how much they've wandered during that evolution. An interesting fact is that mountain lions are very closely related to cheetahs. Also, lions are most closely related to jaguars. Ligers, which are hybrids of lions and tigers, are trippy-looking animals. I wonder what a lion-jaguar cross would look like. Or a tiger-snow leopard one.

If you have an interest in this sort of thing, check TWWDLI out. It's another one of my favorite paleo/bio/evo blogs.

Evolution is faster than you think

Next time a creationist tells you that you can't see evolution happening, tell them about this story. Evolution is change in organisms over time. It doesn't have to take millions of years. The elapsed time in this instance is 36 years. With the climate now undergoing rapid change, it appears that evolution can keep up. Hmm... keep an eye on those pigeons in the park.