paleontology
Intense look at La Brea Tar Pits explains why we have coyotes, not saber-toothed cats
Aug. 5, 2019—The most detailed study to date of ancient predators trapped in the La Brea Tar Pits is helping Americans understand why today we’re dealing with coyotes dumping over garbage cans and not saber-toothed cats ripping our arms off.
Ediacaran dinner party featured plenty to eat, adequate sanitation, computer model shows
Jun. 19, 2019—“They are behaving like animals, and that’s a link between them and what we recognize as animals," says paleontologist Simon A.F. Darroch.
Dolphin ancestor’s hearing was more like hoofed mammals than today’s sea creatures
May. 15, 2019—The team, one of the first in the world to examine the ability’s origins, used a small CT scanner to look inside a 30-million-year-old ear bone fossil from a specimen resembling Olympicetus avitus.
Earth’s oldest animals formed complex ecological communities
Sep. 17, 2018—Ediacara biota were forming complex communities tens of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion.
Koala teeth provide insights into diet
Aug. 22, 2018—Paleontologist Larisa DeSantis' latest research confirms that the shape of tooth wear best indicates the kind of food koalas and kangaroos ate, not whether it was covered in dust and dirt.
Wet and stormy weather lashed California coast…8,200 years ago
Jun. 20, 2017—A study of stalagmite records from the White Moon Cave in the Santa Cruz Mountains finds the California coast was lashed by exceptionally wet and stormy weather for 150 years...8,200 years ago.
The tale teeth tell about the legendary man-eating lions of Tsavo
Apr. 19, 2017—Analysis of the microscopic wear on the teeth of three man-eating lions reveals that painful dental disease may have been what drove the cats to hunt humans instead of larger prey.
Climate change helped kill off super-sized Ice Age animals in Australia
Jan. 26, 2017—A new study has compared the diet of a variety of Australian megafaunal herbivores from the period when they were widespread (350,000 to 570,000 years ago) to a period when they were in decline (30,000 to 40,000 years ago) by studying their fossil teeth. The analysis suggests that climate change had a significant impact on their diets and may well have been a primary factor in their extinction.
Fossils at the Fort is March 19
Mar. 10, 2016—Fossils at the Fort is a free annual event providing young and old with an opportunity to journey into Middle Tennessee's astonishing ancient past.
Cougars’ diverse diet helped them survive the mass extinction that wiped out the saber-tooth cat, American lion
Apr. 22, 2014—Cougars may have survived a mass extinction that took place about 12,000 years ago because they were not particular about what they ate.
Evidence shows starvation did not cause saber-tooth cat extinction
Dec. 26, 2012—The latest study of the microscopic wear patterns on the teeth of the American lions and saber-toothed cats that roamed North America in the late Pleistocene found that they were living well off the fat of the land in the period just before they went extinct.