tommys-sketchbook:

New book! 

archaeologicalnews:

In “Jurassic Park,” scientists extract 80-million-year-old dino DNA from the bellies of mosquitoes trapped in amber. Researchers may never be able to extract genetic material that old and bring a T. rex back to life, but a new study suggests DNA can survive in fossils longer than previously believed.

The oldest DNA samples ever recovered are from insects and plants in ice cores in Greenland up to 800,000 years old. But researchers had not been able to determine the oldest possible DNA they could get from the fossil record because DNA’s rate of decay had remained a mystery.

Now scientists in Australia report they’ve been able to estimate this rate based on a comparison of DNA from 158 fossilized leg bones from three species of the moa, an extinct group of flightless birds that once lived in New Zealand. The bones date between 600 and 8,000 years old and importantly all come from the same region. Read more.

biblioguerilla:

Fossils and a shark tooth, the earliest printed depictions. Verstegen/Rowlands, Richard. A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence. (4to. London, John Bill, 1628).

orbixy:

This is an illustration I did several months ago for my degree. The specimen was a Dastilbe crandalli from the Crato formartion in Nova Olinda Brazil. It was a slightly unusual specimen in terms of its orientaion, as it didn’t lay on its side in relation to the bedding of the matrix, as such it has been crushed into a strange position with many details of the skull being crushed. The view is Dorsal-lateral. These fish are common and are of Aptian age, early Cretaceous 125-112 Ma.

inkitiness:

T-shirt design for the Joseph Moore Museum, featuring our Megalonyxx and Smilodon casts.

moschops911:

1025066 by El Bibliomata on Flickr.

Ammonites from La Terre Avant le Déluge by Louis Figuier

inkitiness:

North American Giant Sloth (Megalonyxx Jeffersonii), drawn from life from the cast fossil at the Joseph Moore Museum.

inkitiness:

Allosaurus fossil in pencil for the Joseph Moore Musuem. Drawn from life from the JMM cast.

dino-files:

Name: Europasaurus
Pronounced: Your-Rope-Ah-Saw-Russ
Classification: Sauropod
Sub-family: Macronarian
Temporal Range: Late Jurassic (155-150 Mya)
Length: 6.5 metres
Height: 3 metres
Weight: 700kg
Movement: Quadrupedal
Feeding Type: Herbivore

Information:
- Discovery: Europasaurus represents a basal macronarian sauropod that lived during the Late Jurassic period of northern Germany. Remains of both juvenile and adult animals have been recovered from marine sediment in the Langenberg Quarry, situated in Lower Saxony, Germany. The specimens found range from 1.7-6.2 metres in length, and are thought to represent around eleven individual animals. Europasaurus is an interesting species; in that species dwarfism is a derived characteristic. Although Europasaurus is a member of the macronarian sauropod family, it differs from its close relatives (dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus) in that it is a dwarf species; and although anatomically similar to Camarasaurus, it is much smaller in size.

- Statistics: A full grown Europasaurus would have been one of the smallest sauropods to have ever existed. An adult Europasaurus would have grown to maximum lengths of around 6.5 metres and weighed only about 700kg.

- Description: The small size of Europasaurus has been interpreted as a case of insular dwarfism, an occurrence where animals grow smaller so as to not exhaust the reduced amounts of food present within their unique ecosystem. It is thought that Europasaurus would have ‘dwarfed rapidly’ after immigrating to a paleo-island situated within the Lower Saxony basin. The largest of these islands would have been less than 2,000 square kilometres in size and therefore would not have been able to support a sufficient food supply for a species of ‘normal-sized’ sauropods. This dwarfism has been confirmed by the study of Europasaurus bones which show that it grew at a much slower rate than other sauropod dinosaurs, so while it probably matched them in terms of anatomy, its upper size limit was capped at a smaller size. 

(via lostbeasts)

rifke-s:

front cover plan 1 on Flickr.