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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. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s hard enough to find fossils of hard things like dinosaur bones. Now scientists have found evidence of 95 million-year-old octopuses, among the rarest and unlikeliest of fossils, complete with ink and suckers.

When an octopus dies, it quickly decays and liquefies into a slimy blob. After just a few days there will be nothing left at all. The specimens, preserve the octopuses’ eight arms with traces of muscles and rows of suckers. Even traces of the ink and internal gills are present in some specimens. Read the rest of this entry »

A rare fossilized dinosaur nest helps answer the conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg, two paleontologists say.

The small carnivorous dinosaur sat over her nest of eggs some 77 million years ago, along a sandy river beach. When water levels rose, Mom seems to have fled, leaving the unhatched offspring.

Researchers have now studied the fossil nest and at least five partial eggs. The nest is a mound of sand that extends about 1.6 feet (half a meter) across and weighs as much as a small person, or about 110 pounds (50 kg). Read the rest of this entry »

A scientist who bought a fossilised insect on the web auction site eBay for £20 has discovered that it belongs to a previously unknown species of aphid.

Dr Richard Harrington, vice-president of the UK’s Royal Entomological Society, bought the fossil from an individual in Lithuania.

He then sent it off to an aphid expert in Denmark, who confirmed the insect was a new species, now extinct.

The bug has been named Mindarus harringtoni after the scientist.

“I was interested to see what it was because I’ve worked with a team of people involved in monitoring and forecasting aphids, those of greenfly and their relatives in this country,” Dr Harrington told BBC News. Read the rest of this entry »

CARACAS (AFP) – Venezuela has found the first fossils of an extinct scimitar cat — of the saber-toothed cat genus — in South America, during oil prospecting activities southeast of Caracas, paleontologists announced.

“It’s South America’s most important discovery in 60 years,” Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Investigation paleontologist Ascanio Rincon told AFP on Monday.

He said fossils of six scimitar cats, or Homotherium, were found along with those of panthers, wolves, camels, condors, ducks and horses, all from about 1.8 million years ago, by a Petroleos de Venezuela team looking for oil in Monagas state in 2006.

The most important find, he said, was the complete skull of a scimitar cat, an animal never before found in South America.

“For us it’s a milestone and opens a window to the past.”

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