Natural History (13.8 billion years BC – 3.3 million BC)

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The first Europeans reached Ukraine 1.4 million years ago, new study finds

by John Jansen, The Conversation
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-europeans ... years.html

During warm periods in Earth's history, known as interglacials, glaciers the size of continents pulled back to reveal new landscapes. These were new worlds for early humans to explore and exploit, and 1.4 million years ago this was Europe: a Terra nullius unoccupied by humans.

Long before it emerged as the epicenter of global colonialism, Europe was itself colonized for the first time by humans migrating from the east.

A new study, led by a team from the Czech Academy of Sciences and Aarhus University and published this week in Nature, reports the earliest human presence in Europe, at a site on the Tysa River in western Ukraine known as Korolevo.
Buried stone tools at Korolevo, Ukraine

We studied a layer of stone tools left on a river bed by the people who crafted them. These "core-and-flake" tools were made in the Oldowan style, the most primitive form of tool-making, first classified by the palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey in east Africa. Similar tools have also been found at the oldest known sites of human occupation in Europe, the Levant, and Asia.

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70 million year old nearly complete dinosaur found in France.

Titanosaur found intact

Researchers estimated the age of the newly discovered fossil to be around 70 to 72 million years old, but Titanosaurs roamed around on four legs from the Late Jurassic Epoch to the end of the Cretaceous Period, approximately 163.5 million to 66 million years ago. Titanosaurs belong to a larger group of dinosaurs known as sauropods, a family of long-necked herbivores that were some of the largest dinosaurs of their time, according to Britannica.

Remains of Titanosaur fossils are widely unearthed in Europe, but few are discovered in anatomical connection, Boschetto said. Finding a skeleton in this connected state suggests that the body was buried before it had entirely decomposed, leaving “some tissues connecting the bones to one another,” said Matthew Carrano, research geologist and curator of Dinosauria at the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History.

More at link,

https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather- ... il/1629365

[weatheriscool]

Scientists Discover the World's Oldest Fossilized Forest in Wales
The forest stood some 390 million years ago when life on Earth looked much different than it does today.
By Ryan Whitwam March 11, 2024

https://www.extremetech.com/science/sci ... t-in-wales

Today, about 30% of Earth's surface is covered with forest, but there was a time millions of years ago when trees as we know them didn't exist. Scientists from the UK studying the earliest plants we would recognize as trees have announced an important discovery in their own backyard. The most ancient fossilized forest ever discovered has been unearthed on the north coast of Devon and Somerset in Wales. The researchers say this forest stood about 390 million years ago and could tell us a great deal about plant evolution.

[weatheriscool]

New method finds higher carnivorous dinosaur biodiversity in Kem Kem beds of Morocco

Brand new insights

Simon Wills, a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum who led the research, says, "The use of machine learning to identify theropod teeth has thrown the doors wide open to the ecosystem of the dinosaurs that roamed the Kem Kem 100 million years ago. It was fascinating to see how the powerful tool accurately identified the specimens when combined with traditional methods."

"The process highlights how embracing methods old and new can uncover brand new insights into relatively well-explored areas. I believe we'll see advances beyond what we thought possible in the coming years as our datasets grow, meaning machine learning can reveal more about paleodiversity and ecosystems from even the smallest remains—such as teeth!"

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-method-hi ... rsity.html

[Time_Traveller]

Scientists find skull of enormous ancient dolphin in Amazon

Wed 20 Mar 2024 18.00 GMT



Scientists have discovered the fossilised skull of a giant river dolphin, from a species thought to have fled the ocean and sought refuge in Peru’s Amazonian rivers 16m years ago. The extinct species would have measured up to 3.5 metres long, making it the largest river dolphin ever found.

The discovery of this new species, Pebanista yacuruna, highlights the looming risks to the world’s remaining river dolphins, all of which face similar extinction threats in the next 20 to 40 years, according to the lead author of new research published in Science Advances today. Aldo Benites-Palomino said it belonged to the Platanistoidea family of dolphins commonly found in oceans between 24m and 16m years ago.

Surviving river dolphins were “the remnants of what were once greatly diverse marine dolphin groups”, he said, which were thought to have left the oceans to find new food sources in freshwater rivers.

“Rivers are the escape valve … for the ancient fossil we found, and it is the same for all river dolphins living today.”

Benites-Palomino discovered the fossil in Peru in 2018 when he was still an undergraduate. He is now working on a doctorate at the University of Zurich’s department of paleontology, and says the research paper was delayed by the pandemic.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... extinction

[Time_Traveller]

The 1.6 million-year-old discovery that changes what we know about human evolution

1 day ago

New research has pinpointed the likely time in prehistory when humans first began to speak.

Analysis by British archaeologist Steven Mithen suggests that early humans first developed rudimentary language around 1.6 million years ago – somewhere in eastern or southern Africa.

“Humanity’s development of the ability to speak was without doubt the key which made much of subsequent human physical and cultural evolution possible. That’s why dating the emergence of the earliest forms of language is so important,” Dr Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, told The Independent.

Until recently, most human evolution experts thought humans only started speaking around 200,000 years ago. Professor Mithen’s new research, published this month, suggests that rudimentary human language is at least eight times older. His analysis is based on a detailed study of all the available archaeological, paleo-anatomical, genetic, neurological and linguistic evidence.

When combined, all the evidence suggests that the birth of language occurred as part of a suite of human evolution and other developments between two and 1.5 million years ago.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/scie ... 17744.html

[Time_Traveller]

Scientists decode what happened when the moon once ‘turned itself inside out’

4 hours ago



Scientists have finally discovered the sequence of events that likely led to the Earth’s moon turning itself inside out billions of years ago.

Most of what researchers know about the moon’s origin and its geology comes from analysis of rocks collected by Apollo astronauts which show surprisingly high concentrations of titanium.

Researchers suspect that when the moon formed around 4.5 billion years ago when another massive body in the solar system smashed into Earth, it was initially hot and covered by a global magma ocean.

But how it came to be the form that we currently see today when we look up at night has remained a mystery.

As the molten rock gradually cooled, it formed the moon’s mantle and the bright crust, but deeper below, it was wildly out of equilibrium.

https://www.independent.co.uk/space/moo ... 26923.html

[Time_Traveller]

Enormous ancient sea reptile identified from amateur fossil find

18 minutes ago



Scientists have identified what was probably the largest marine reptile ever to swim in the seas - a creature longer than two, nose-to-nose buses.

The creature lived around 202 million years ago alongside the dinosaurs.

Its fossilised jawbone was found in 2016 by a fossil hunter on a Somerset beach. In 2020 a father and daughter found a second, very similar jawbone.

Experts now say the fossils are from two giant ichthyosaur reptiles, which could have been 25m long.

That is bigger than a huge pliosaur whose skull was found embedded in Dorset cliffs and was in the David Attenborough documentary the Giant Sea Monster.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-68831349

[wjfox]

Move Over Titanoboa, Fossil Of "Largest Snake To Have Ever Existed" Found In Gujarat

April 19, 2024 10:57 am IST

Scientists have said that a fossil vertebrae unearthed in Gujarat are the remains of the largest snake that ever lived, which was longer than the T-rex. The discovery of 'Vasuki Indicus' was made in 2005 by scientists from IIT-Roorkee and recently confirmed as a giant snake. It establishes India's crucial link in the origin and evolutionary process of various species, especially reptiles. The researchers have discovered 27 vertebrae from the snake, and some of them looks like a large python and would not have been venomous. They estimate the length of the snake to be in the range of 11-15 metres (about 50 feet) and it must have weighed 1 tonne.

The research was published in 'Scientific Reports' on 'Springer Nature' on Thursday.

"Considering its large size, Vasuki was a slow-moving ambush predator that would subdue its prey through constriction like anacondas and pythons. This snake lived in a marshy swamp near the coast at a time when global temperatures were higher than today," Debajit Datta, a postdoctoral researcher in palaeontology at IIT-Roorkee and the lead author of the study, told The Guardian.

The fossil has been named after Vasuki, the snake king associated with Lord Shiva.

https://www.ndtv.com/science/move-over- ... at-5474872

[weatheriscool]

Move Over Titanoboa, Fossil Of "Largest Snake To Have Ever Existed" Found In Gujarat

April 19, 2024 10:57 am IST

Scientists have said that a fossil vertebrae unearthed in Gujarat are the remains of the largest snake that ever lived, which was longer than the T-rex. The discovery of 'Vasuki Indicus' was made in 2005 by scientists from IIT-Roorkee and recently confirmed as a giant snake. It establishes India's crucial link in the origin and evolutionary process of various species, especially reptiles. The researchers have discovered 27 vertebrae from the snake, and some of them looks like a large python and would not have been venomous. They estimate the length of the snake to be in the range of 11-15 metres (about 50 feet) and it must have weighed 1 tonne.

The research was published in 'Scientific Reports' on 'Springer Nature' on Thursday.

"Considering its large size, Vasuki was a slow-moving ambush predator that would subdue its prey through constriction like anacondas and pythons. This snake lived in a marshy swamp near the coast at a time when global temperatures were higher than today," Debajit Datta, a postdoctoral researcher in palaeontology at IIT-Roorkee and the lead author of the study, told The Guardian.

The fossil has been named after Vasuki, the snake king associated with Lord Shiva.

https://www.ndtv.com/science/move-over- ... at-5474872

Like I fucking tell people. One day bigger snakes will be found and we know very little of the fossil record. well, here it is.