Jack Horner: Shape-shifting dinosaurs. Comparative Craniology of the Ceratopsia. Golden Window on a Lost World. One day in the late Eocene, a jaguar prowled through a bamboo thicket on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. As the cat padded by, several seeds snagged onto its fur with their tiny hooks, a dispersal trick that often carried the seeds to fertile ground.
This time, however, their free ride ended in a pool of resin, and immortality of a sort. Irritated by the seeds’ spiky hooks, the cat rubbed against the trunk of a Hymenaea tree, a great resin producer of the American and African tropics. A wound in the tree’s bark oozed a puddle of the sticky stuff, and by chance the cat left a tuft of fur and one of the annoying grass seeds in the goo. Tens of millions of years later the resin, still encapsulating the fur and seed, would surface again, now hardened into the fossil called amber. Poinar’s passion for amber has nearly outgrown his office. To display his discoveries, Poinar prefers the detail of photomicrographs, and in one such blowup the cat hair and seed are clearly visible. Meet Inuk – full genome of ancient human tells us about his hair, eyes, skin, teeth, ancestry and earwax | Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Meet “Inuk”. He is the ninth human to have their entire genome sequenced but unlike the previous eight, he has been dead for some 4,000 years old. Even so, DNA samples from a tuft of his frozen hair have revealed much about his appearance and his ancestry. Inuk had brown eyes and brown skin. His blood type was A+. His hair was thick and dark but had he lived, he might not have kept it – his genes reveal a high risk of baldness. Inuk may well have died quite young. Like many Asians and Native Americans, his front teeth were “shovel-graded”, meaning that their back faces had ridged sides and concave middles. Inuk is the singular of Inuit and it means “man”. This isn’t the first time that scientists have tried to sequence the genes of an ancient human (or related species).
Scientists have developed ingenious workarounds to this problem, but Rasmussen’s team solved it by working with a well-frozen specimen and focusing on his hair. Portrait by Nuka Godfredsen More on genomics: Frozen Baby Mammoth Unearthed. Last May, a Siberian reindeer herder named Yuri Khudi chanced upon the world’s most intact mammoth remains, unearthed by erosion of a riverbank, and promptly turned them over to the natural history museum in the Russian town of Salekhard. The frozen woolly mammoth, named Lyuba in honor of Khudi’s wife, had died at the age of about 4 months. She is estimated to have lived between 40 thousand and 30 thousand years ago.
“What makes it so special is that it is more complete and better preserved than any comparable mammoth specimens that have ever been found,” says University of Michigan paleontologist Daniel Fisher. “This is a chance to look at mammoth anatomy in its entirety.” The carcass is scheduled to visit Japan for a full-body CT scan before being moved to St. Petersburg for a detailed autopsy. Paleontologists will focus especially on the chemical and isotopic composition of Lyuba’s baby tusks.
Go to the next story: 70. How are Fossils Formed? So how are fossils formed anyway? There are several processes that plants and animals or their parts can be preserved. No matter which way preservation occurs it takes a lot of luck, pure happenstance. Most living things are quickly recycled upon death. Scavengers and bacteria usually consume all but bones and shells. Still millions of fossils have been found.
If you think about all of the museums, university paleontology labs, fossil dealers, and private collectors, there really are a lot of fossils that have been discovered! However when you think of the billions and billions of living things that have inhabited the earth over the last 550 million years only a very small percentage are immortalized in stone! The following is a list with descriptions answering the question “How are fossils Formed?” How are fossils formed? Drying (desiccation)- Mummified bodies of animals including humans have been discovered in arid parts of the world.
How are fossils formed? How are fossils formed? Fossilization. GEOL 104: Fossils and Fossilization. Fall Semester 2013Fossils and Fossilization Fossils: The physical traces of past life. Or, more fully, a fossil is any remain of an ancient organism or its behavior preserved in the rock record. (Derived from the Latin word "fossilium": that which is dug up. Originally used for anything found in the ground, but by the 19th Century had come to mean traces of past life.) Fossils are the only direct evidence of past life, although indirect evidence exists in the form of the evolutionary and biogeographic distribution of modern organisms.
Two major types of fossils: Trace fossils: the record of organisms' behavior preserved in rock. Trace fossils are, essentially, biologically-generated sedimentary structures. Preservation of trace fossils is just like other sedimentary structures: must have rapid burial, and preserved by lithification of the rock itself. Body fossils: can be preserved in a variety of ways. For vertebrates (such as dinosaurs), body fossils are primarily bones and teeth Bone: Teacher's Domain: The Record of Time.