Today, we often think of knowledge as emerging in real time - we rarely associate patience with knowledge creation. Yet in many fields, discoveries can take years to develop. Paleontology is one of my favourite fields of discovery. Recently, paleontologists unveiled six new bat species, representing 33 specimens dating back 35 million year - the results of 25 years of painstaking fieldwork. Few bat fossils have been found in Africa so these specimens will change the accepted interpretations of bat evolution. Conventional wisdom (US centric) had bats evolving in the Northern hemisphere. This latest research indicates modern bats only diversified after first migrating out of Africa. New World bats apparently have ancient roots deep in the heart of the Old World!
For fifty years paleontologists have been 'robustly' debating, whether Pachycephalosaurs a sheep-sized dinosaur dating back 80 to 65 million years ago and found extensively in Canada, the U.S. and China could have butted heads during mating. Pachycephalosaurs are famous for their thick dome shaped heads. The rutting theory emerged are one explaination of Pachycephalosaur's peculiar heads. Now a researcher from University of Alberta has applied finite element analysis (see last week's Komodo dragon post) to simulate collisions amongst three Pachycephalosaur species. A combination of the Pachycephalosaur's thick domes (up to 20 cms) combined with sliding joints in their vertebrae enables nearly-adult Pachycephalosaurs to battle each other with minimal damage - at least in theory.
In the Andes, paleontologists endured thin air, limited water and freezing nights in Chucal, Chile to excavate a new species of armoured mammal. Three feet long and weighing 200 lbs, Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis (try saying that late at night!) is small for glyptodont - an extinct relative of armadillos which could grow to the size of a small car and went extinct around the time humans arrived in the New World. Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis is interesting because its many primitive features. At over 14,000 feet above sea level, Chucal itself is an unusual site. Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis brings the number of new species discovered there up to 18, including armadillos, opossums, rodents, frogs and hoofed animals.
http://www.vertpaleo.org/news/permalinks/2008/03/08/PRESS-RELEASE---Giant-Fossil-Bats-Out-of-Africa/ http://www.vertpaleo.org/news/permalinks/2008/01/22/PRESS-RELEASE---New-fossil-armored-mammal-from-the-high-peaks-of-Chile/ Image: 1. Reconstruction of Witwati schlosseri, Bonnie Miljour, 2. Pachycephalosaur fossil, www.paleodirect.com 3. Computer simulation of Pachycephalosaur, Chris Kriegner & Tetsuto Miyashita, 4. Reconstruction of Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis , Velizar Simeonovski