The discovery of the oldest bee fossil supports the theory that bees evolved from wasps, scientists reported Wednesday.
The 100 million-year-old fossil was found in a mine in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar (Burma) and preserved in amber. Amber, which begins as tree sap, often traps insects and plant structures before they fossilize.
“This is the oldest known bee we’ve ever been able to identify, and it shares some of the features of wasps,” said lead author George Poinar, a researcher from Oregon State University. “But overall it’s more bee than wasp, and gives us a pretty good idea of when these two types of insects were separating on their evolutionary paths.”
The quarter-inch fossil shares traits of the carnivorous wasp such as narrow hind legs while exhibiting branched hairs on its leg, a characteristic of the modern bee that allows pollen collection.
Around the same time the bee was trapped, plants that rely on mechanisms other than the wind to spread their seeds, started expanding and diversifying. Prior to that, the world was mostly green with conifer trees that depended on the wind for pollination.
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The partial leg bone of a sabre-toothed cat has been dredged from the seabed by a trawler in the North Sea.
The rare fossil, which is between one and two million years old and was found near the UK coast, is from a type of sabre-tooth called a scimitar cat.
According to palaeontologist Dick Mol, it belonged to an animal that was as heavy as a small horse.
It is the furthest north this species has ever been found, and the first time remains have come from the North Sea.
The dry steppe landscape, criss-crossed by rivers, where animals such as the scimitar cat once roamed was flooded at the end of the last Ice Age.
The fossil remains of more common extinct beasts such as the mammoth are routinely recovered from the sea by trawlers.
Beam trawlers use special gear to touch the sea bed, capturing flatfish lying in the sand. But this also stirs up shallow, buried fossil remains which can end up in the nets.
In the Netherlands, trawlermen are paid up to 100 euros for such discoveries.
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A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.
Proteins such as collagen are far more durable than DNA, but they had not been expected to last the 65 million years since the dinosaurs died out. So palaeontologist Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University attracted wide attention when she reported finding first soft tissue and later collagen from a Tyrannosaurus rex leg bone that was intact until it was broken during excavation.
Yet critics said the extraordinary claim required extraordinary evidence, and asked for protein sequences, better handling of samples to prevent contamination, and confirmation analyses from other laboratories.
So Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80 million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample, sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.
Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more between species.
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Meet Matilda, or Diamantinasaurus matildae (above, in an artist’s depiction), one of two giant, plant-eating dinosaur species recently discovered in Australia.
The fossilized creature, which measures almost 60 feet (18 meters) long, was unearthed in the northeastern outback town of Winton, Queensland, in 2006. A third new species, a carnivorous dinosaur dubbed Banjo, was also found at the site. (Watch a video about Banjo’s discovery.)
The dinosaurs were named after famed Australian poet Banjo Paterson and characters from his works.
The 98-million-year-old Matilda is the first new sauropod to be described in Australia in 75 years, said team member Scott Hocknull, a paleontologist and senior curator of geosciences at Queensland Museum in Brisbane.
The fossils, described recently in the journal PLoS One, were unveiled at the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History in Winton on July 3, 2009.
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Paleontologists have made the most important discovery to date at the Arlington Archosaur Site, a prolific fossil site in North Arlington, Texas. The disassembled skull of a crocodile with two and a half inch long teeth that lived nearly 100 million years ago has been unearthed.
We have over 50 bones exposed,” said The University of Texas at Arlington dinosaurs lecturer Derek Main, who heads the project. “They are truly impressive. The teeth measure 6.5 centimeters, larger than my thumb.”
To date, more dinosaur fossils have been recovered from the Arlington Archosaur Site, where excavation began little more than a year ago, than from any other site in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The site lies within Cretaceous rocks, formed 95 million years ago when Arlington was the beachhead for a giant sea that divided the continent.
The site has yielded fossils from various species of animals, including dinosaurs. A skeleton of a large herbivorous “duck billed” dinosaur was excavated from the northern hillside at the site. Crocodile fossils are among the most commonly found.
Main said the site is unique because it is a major dinosaur excavation in the middle of a large metropolitan setting and it preserves many fossils from different animals. he site also has fossils from turtles, lungfish, fish and sharks. The excavation of the Arlington Archosaur Site began in the spring of 2008 when the Huffines Group obtained the property and granted land access to UT Arlington.
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Swarms of up to a thousand giant trilobites—extinct marine arthropods such as this 35-inch-long (90-centimeter-long) fossil specimen—roamed shallow prehistoric seas, new fossils show.
The 465-million-year-old fossils, found recently in northern Portugal, are of the largest trilobites ever discovered.
The trilobites may have clustered to mate and molt—shedding old exoskeletons as new ones grew in—as well as avoid predators, scientists say.
The benefits of swarming may explain why these distant relatives of horseshoe crabs were among the most widespread arthropods of the Paleozoic era (542 to 251 million years ago).
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