A giant, strong-jawed salamander once tunneled through ancient Tennessee soil.
And thanks to a fossil unearthed near East Tennessee State University, scientists now better understand how it helped shape Appalachian amphibian diversity.
The giant…
Category: Paleontology
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Paleontologists Identify Fossil from British Columbia as Early Jurassic Ichthyosaur
A partial skeleton found in the Fernie Formation in British Columbia, Canada, back in 1916 represents a new genus and species of an extinct marine reptile called ichthyosaur, according to an international team of paleontologists.
Photograph…
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A modeling approach to quantify ecological dynamics and functional structures of paleocommunities
del Monte-Luna, P. et al. A review of recent and future marine extinctions. Camb. Prism. Extinct. 1, e13 (2023).
Barnosky, A. D. et al. Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived? Nature 471, 51–57 (2011).
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South American Mastodons Regularly Consumed Fruits, Study Suggests
Most megafaunal herbivores in the Americas went extinct around 10,000 years ago, presumably disrupting the long-distance seed dispersal of large, fleshy-fruited plant species. Proposed in 1982, the neotropical anachronism hypothesis suggests…
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The 10,000-mile march through fire that made dinosaurs possible
The forerunners of dinosaurs and crocodiles in the Triassic period were able to migrate across areas of the ancient world deemed completely inhospitable to life, new research suggests.
In a paper published in Nature Ecology and…
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Three-and-a-half million years of Tibetan Plateau vegetation dynamics in response to climate change
Regional settings
The Zoige Basin is a low-relief tectonic basin (32° 10′‒34° 10ʹ N, 101° 45ʹ‒103° 25′ E, ~3,350‒3,450 m a.s.l) on the eastern TP (Fig. 1a–c). A huge lake occupied the basin during the Pleistocene,…
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14,000-Year-Old ‘Tumat Puppies’ from Siberian Permafrost Are Not Early Dogs, New Analysis Shows
The Tumat Puppies, two permafrost-preserved Late Pleistocene canids, have been hypothesized to have been littermates and early domesticated dogs due to a physical association with butchered mammoth bones. However, a new multifaceted analysis…
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New Species of Tyrannosauroid Dinosaur Discovered in Mongolia
Scientifically named Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, the newly-identified tyrannosauroid species is the closest-known ancestor to Tyrannosaurus rex.
Khankhuuluu mongoliensis. Image credit: Julius Csotonyi.
Khankhuuluu mongoliensis roamed our planet…
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Study: Triassic Reptiles Were Able to Migrate across Tropical Areas Deemed Inhospitable to Life
Using a novel method of geographical analysis, paleontologists inferred how archosauromorphs dispersed following one of the most impactful climate events the Earth has ever seen, the end-Permian mass extinction.
Benggwigwishingasuchus…
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Landscape-explicit phylogeography illuminates the ecographic radiation of early archosauromorph reptiles
Benson, R., Butler, R., Close, R., Saupe, E. & Rabosky, D. Biodiversity across space and time in the fossil record. Curr. Biol. 31, 1225–1236 (2021).
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Malanoski, C., Farnsworth,…
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