ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

A 170 m record of marine sediment cores extracted from Adélie Land in Antarctica is yielding new insights into the complicated relationship between sea ice and climate change.

Many scientists consider the 'Cambrian explosion' -- which occurred about 530-540 million years ago -- as the first major appearance of many of the world's animal groups in the fossil record. Like adding pieces to a giant jigsaw puzzle, each discovery dating from this time period has added another piece to the evolutionary map of modern animals. Now, researchers have found a rare, 500-million-year-old 'worm-like' fossil called a palaeoscolecid, which is an uncommon fossil group in North America. The researchers believe this find, from an area in western Utah, can help scientists better understand how diverse the Earth's animals were during the Cambrian explosion.

Viral fossils buried in DNA may protect against future virus infections, a new marsupial study suggests.

Spectacular ice age landscapes beneath the North Sea have been discovered using 3D seismic reflection technology. Similar to MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) the images reveal in unprecedented detail huge seafloor channels - each one 10 times wider than the River Thames.

A new dinosaur from the lower Upper Cretaceous of Uzbekistan, Ulughbegsaurus uzbekistanensis, was described from a single maxilla fossil. The research team estimated that this carcharodontosaurian weighed over 1000 kg and measured 7.5--8.0 meters in length, much larger than previously described predators from the same formation. The fossil's age, location, and co-occurrence with the smaller tyrannosaurid Timurlengia shed light on the transition from carcharodontosaurians to tyrannosaurids occupying the apex predator niche.