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July 17th, 2012
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!

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!

December 13th, 2011

Divers retrieve prehistoric wood from Lake Huron

earthandscience:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2011) — Under the cold clear waters of Lake Huron, University of Michigan researchers have found a five-and-a-half foot-long, pole-shaped piece of wood that is 8,900 years old. The wood, which is tapered and beveled on one side in a way that looks deliberate, may provide important clues to a mysterious period in North American prehistory.

This was the stage when humans gradually shifted from hunting large mammals like mastodon and caribou to fishing, gathering and agriculture,” said anthropologist John O’Shea. “But because most of the places in this area that prehistoric people lived are now under water, we don’t have good evidence of this important shift itself- just clues from before and after the change.”

August 22nd, 2011
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 )

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)