earthandscience:

The fossilised skull of a colossal whale with a killer bite has been uncovered by a team who reckon the monster shared the Miocene oceans with a giant shark.

The bones, dated to 12 to 13 million years ago, were spotted by Klaas Post of the Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in Peru’s Ica desert. In homage to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the beast has been named Leviathan melvillei.

The skull is a huge 3 metres long, says team member Olivier Lambert at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. The team estimates the whale would have been between 13 and 18 metres long, like a modern sperm whale.

What really surprised the researchers was the size of the whale’s teeth. “Some of the biggest ones are 36 centimetres long and 12 centimetres wide, and are probably the biggest predatory teeth ever discovered,” Lambert says.

Read More @ Ancient monster whale more fearsome than Moby Dick

super cool!

fossil falls on Flickr.

- view large and decluttr.com/4210426880

rhamphotheca:

Fossil Microbes Could be Earth’s Oldest Life

by Stephanie Pappas

Even before there was much oxygen on Earth, there was life, a new fossil discovery reveals. The findings have implications for finding alien life in our solar system such as on Mars, the researchers speculate. 

Scientists have unearthed microscopic fossils of microbes that subsisted on sulfur instead of oxygen almost 3.5 billion years ago. At the time, the Earth was a warm, violent place without land plants or algae to produce oxygen through photosynthesis. The sky was overcast, trapping heat near Earth’s surface, and the oceans were the temperature of a hot bath.

“At last, we have good solid evidence for life over 3.4 billion years ago,” study researcher Martin Brasier of Oxford University said of the fossils, which were found in Australia. “It confirms there were bacteria at this time, living without oxygen.”

Sulfur-loving bacteria still exist today, found in hydrothermal vents, hot springs, soil and otherextreme environments that do not have much oxygen. The newly discovered fossils were found in some of the oldest sedimentary rocks on Earth, in a remote part of Western Australia called Strelley Pool…

(read more: Live Science)   (image: David Wacey )

(via just-breezy)

Aliens exist, and we have proof.

That astonishingly awesome claim comes from Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, who says he has found conclusive evidence of alien life — fossils of bacteria found in an extremely rare class of meteorite called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites. (There are only nine such meteorites on planet Earth.) Hoover’s findings were published late Friday night in the Journal of Cosmology, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover, who has spent more than 10 years studying meteorites around the world, told FoxNews.com in an interview. “This field of study has just barely been touched — because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

Hoover discovered the fossils by breaking apart the CI1 meteorite, and analyzing the exposed rock with a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to detect any fossil remains. What he found were fossils of micro-organisms, many of which he says are strikingly similar to those found on our own planet.

“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” said Hoover. Some of the fossils, however, are quite odd. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stump.”

In order to satisfy the inevitable hoard of buzz-killing skeptics, Hoover’s study and evidence were made available to his peers in the scientific community in advance of the study’s publications, giving them a chance to thoroughly dissect his findings. Comments from those who decided to sift through the evidence will be published online, alongside the study.

“Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis,” writes Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics scientist Dr. Rudy Schild, who serves as the Journal of Cosmology’s editor-in-chief. “No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published.”

NASA scientist finds evidence of alien life