The better to hug you with, my dear....

Mystery of dinosaur with giant arms solved

Piles and piles of bones, artifacts, fish

Piles of prehistoric bones!

Piles of 'artifacts spanning more than 15 centuries of Etruscan, Roman and medieval civilization in Tuscany'.

Piles of dead sea creatures.  Stop ghost fishing.

Shocking Statistics
Up to 30% of all fish are caught in ghost nets.
Roughly 10%, or 640,000 tons of all marine debris are caught in ghost nets.
As of right now, and still counting, there has been thousands of seabirds, 20,000 northern fur seals, and 500,000 octopi caught in ghost nets.
Over a 23 week period, there has been 11 harbor seals, 450 salmon, 1,300 spiny dogfish, 1,800 birds, and 16,900 crabs caught in just one net.
In the wreck of the MV Infidel off the coast of Santa Catalina Island alone, 4.5 tons of netting sank to the ocean floor.

Bits and pieces

Tesla Model S... by Oatmeal.

Girl's skeleton found in cave sheds light on origins of first Americans DNA recovered from 12,000-year-old skeleton help to dispel claims that first Americans came from Australia, Asia or Europe.

What on earth is this prehistoric beast?!

Rachael Carson

Misconceptions about WWI.

Hard to be a supporter of Cliven Bundy ... they're running out of cash.

Solar wind energy tower.

From fossils to ... fossils.

Oldest primate skeleton unveiled

Americans speak differently across the nation.

Heracleion Photos: Lost Egyptian City Revealed After 1,200 Years Under Sea

Perspective from a dwarf on the character Tyrion in the TV show Game of Thrones

Chinese company cleaning up US pork?

The sugar beet is entirely GMO at this point.

Rebranding the Republican name is superficial fakery and people can tell.

OMG!!

Grenades!

Wild leopard attacks!!

Colorado burns!

The bomb in Obama's health care explodes!!

Ancient mammals as big as cars!

But none of this matters because we are cooking ourselves right off the planet.



Sorry about that.

Monsanto, Bank of America, Bees, and Cavemen...

Monsanto Found Guilty of Chemical Poisoning in France 

Honeybee Deaths Linked to Corn Insecticides

Corn insecticide linked to great die-off of beneficial honeybees

Bank of America: Too Crooked to Fail

US e-voting system cracked in less than 48 hours

Cave Fossil Find: New Human Species or "Nothing Extraordinary"? 

Why finding a new fossil or kicking Pluto off the list of planets

Doesn't mean science is flawed. Just work in progress:
"Science is about changing ideas based on evidence, not about ignoring evidence to conform to our comfortable ideas."

I think I prefer living nowadays...

Megafauna are thought to have evolved to such large sizes to cope with inhospitable climates and food scarcity, with fossils found in Australia of prehistoric emus, tree-dwelling crocodiles and carnivorous kangaroos.

This from an article about finding the fossil of a 'Mega-Wombat'...

The fossil of a car sized mega-wombat has been unearthed in northern Australia, scientists said Wednesday -- the most complete skeleton of its kind.

Weighing in at a whopping three tonnes, the herbivorous diprotodon was the largest marsupial to ever roam the earth and lived between two million and 50,000 years ago.

I think the tree climbing crocs are the scariest. Would have taken care of this guy in a second:

Australian man spends 6 days up a tree to escape crocodiles

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Lion Tries To Eat Baby, Parents Oddly Okay With It

This fossil find makes me want to watch Jurassic Park again...

How ... odd. Forecast predicts biggest Gulf dead zone ever. I wonder if the oil companies and corn growers want to make the entire Gulf of Mexico dead so they can drill for oil and ignore fertilizer run off in peace....

Tell American Public Media: Report the facts, not anti-organic propaganda paid for by Monsanto

Sunspots are disappearing! Does that mean a little ice age is coming? On top of global warming? I'm so confused....

Curry and fossils and birds, oh my!

Britain's cuckoo bird in trouble:

The iconic cuckoo is in danger of vanishing from Britain after the population dropped by a fifth in one year, experts have warned.

Numbers of the migrant bird fell by a shocking 21 per cent between 2008 and 2009, according to the Breeding Birds Survey (BBS).

Cuckoos have been designated a 'red-list' species by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) - meaning that more than half of the population has disappeared in the past 25 years.

Damage to the bird's winter habitat in West Africa and a decline in the large insect species it eats while on British soil are being blamed for the downturn, although experts still maintain there could be other reasons.

Curry will save the world!

Curry spices could hold the key to reducing the enormous greenhouse gas emissions given off by grazing animals such as sheep, cows and goats, scientists have claimed.

Research carried out at Newcastle University has found that coriander and turmeric – spices traditionally used to flavour curries – can reduce by up to 40 per cent the amount of methane that is produced by bacteria in a sheep's stomach and then emitted into the atmosphere when the animal burps.

Working rather like an anti-biotic, the spices were found to kill the methane-producing "bad" bacteria in the animal's gut while allowing the "good" bacteria to flourish. The findings are part of an ongoing study led by Dr Abdul Shakoor Chaudhry at Newcastle University.

Would it also pre-flavor the meat?

Fossils:

Fossil hunters in Australia have discovered a cave filled with the 15-million-year-old remains of prehistoric marsupials.

The rare haul of fossils includes 26 skulls from an extinct, sheep-sized marsupial with giant claws.

The finds come from the Riversleigh World Heritage fossil field in north-west Queensland.

You realize how difficult it's going to be

To glue tiny feathers to all those plastic T-Rexs?

Now we can blame the Chinese

For starting life in their lakes?

Conventional wisdom has it that the first animals evolved in the ocean.

Now researchers studying ancient rock samples in South China have found that the first animal fossils are preserved in ancient lake deposits, not in marine sediments as commonly assumed.

These new findings not only raise questions as to where the earliest animals were living, but what factors drove animals to evolve in the first place.

For some 3 billion years, single-celled life forms such as bacteria dominated the planet. Then, roughly 600 million years ago, the first multi-cellular animals appeared on the scene, diversifying rapidly.

The oldest known animal fossils in the world are preserved in South China's Doushantuo Formation. These fossil beds have no adult specimens - instead, many of the fossils appear to be microscopic embryos.

"Our first unusual finding in this region was the abundance of a clay mineral called smectite," said researcher Tom Bristow, now at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "In rocks of this age, smectite is normally transformed into other types of clay. The smectite in these South China rocks, however, underwent no such transformation and have a special chemistry that, for the smectite to form, requires specific conditions in the water - conditions commonly found in salty, alkaline lakes."

The researchers collected hundreds of rock samples from several locations in South China. All their analyses suggest these rocks were not marine sediments.

It's understandable...

He has a few drinks, makes an unwanted pass at your girl, takes a swing at your nose....

Human Stabbed a Neanderthal, Evidence Suggests

One cool thing about a drought

You uncover bones of prehistoric beasts.

If Adam had this as a pet...

Where's the collar?

The beautifully preserved remains of a 47-million-year-old, lemur-like creature have been unveiled in the US.

The preservation is so good, it is possible to see the outline of its fur and even traces of its last meal.

The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a "missing link" between today's higher primates - monkeys, apes and humans - and more distant relatives.

S... S... SNAKE!

NEW YORK – Never mind the 40-foot snake that menaced Jennifer Lopez in the 1997 movie "Anaconda." Not even Hollywood could match a new discovery from the ancient world. Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.

"This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus," enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.

"It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately."

Update: Went and found a video:

We descended not from an ape but a grape?

A single-celled ball about the size of a grape may provide an explanation for one of the mysteries of fossil history.

Writing in Current Biology, researchers say the creature leaves tracks on the seabed which mirror fossilised tracks left up to 1.8 billion years ago.

[snip]

Dr Matz says the giant protists' bubble-like structure is probably one of the planet's oldest body designs, and may have existed for 1.8 billion years.

"Our guys may be the ultimate living fossils of the macroscopic world," he says.

I bet he left the lid up, too

Because he certainly forgot to flush:

Washington D.C (AHN) - Fossilized feces, dating back some 14,000 years, is said to be the oldest evidence of human habitation found in North America. The ancient poop offers new DNA evidence about the identity of the first North Americans.

Researchers from the University of Oregon and University of Copenhagen made the discovery after examining DNA found in the oldest of the droppings recovered from caves in Oregon. The sample was carbon-dated and found to be approximately 14,340 years old.

The fossil contains two main genetic types of Asian origin considered unique to present-day Native Americans. The new findings offer proof that immigration took place more than 1,000 years earlier than otherwise believed.These genetic data suggest that the earliest North American settlers hailed from Eastern Asia and Siberia.

Researchers published their findings Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.

University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins found the feces in the Paisley caves, which are located in the south-central part of the state.

How could a fish bury itself in 1,325 meters of earth

If it had only 6,000 years to do it in?

They went drilling for oil in northern Alberta and instead dug up a one-of-a-kind, 96-million-year-old fossilized fish small enough to fit in your palm, but big enough to yield clues on how sea critters migrated in the age of tyrannosaurus rex.

But to fish paleontologist Alison Murray, the Tycheroichthys dunvenganensis is also a big question mark.

"It's complete fossil, which means it must have been killed and buried very, very quickly," said Murray, who now researches at the University of Alberta.

"It wasn't scavenged or broken apart in wave action. It must have been some sort of sudden event that killed it and trapped it in mud."

But based on the biology of its living relatives, the herring family, it is not the type of fish to have swum in muddy waters, she said.

"So I'm not sure what it was doing there. He is an anomaly."

It's a member of the extinct fish family Paraclupeidae. While other members of this family have been found in Lebanon, Morocco and Brazil, the Alberta find is a new genus entirely.

The fossil, written up recently in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, was actually unearthed two decades ago south of Grande Prairie in a core sample taken 1,325 metres below the surface by now-defunct Cequel Energy Inc.

[snip]

Murray said it was swimming in a monster seaway that had cleaved what is now North America in two in the late Cretaceous period.

She said the find is further evidence of a direct water link between North America through Great Britain to the Mediterranean Sea, but also gives credence to the theory of a direct water link from the Mediterranean through what is now Hudson Bay.

At least China's indifference to humanity isn't just to the rest of the world

They pick on their own people too...

A large explosion has levelled a karaoke nightclub in northeast China killing 25 people and leaving another 33 injured.

State media did not give a cause for the blast on Wednesday night in the town of Tianshifu in Liaoning province.

[snip]

China has recently seen a spate of explosions, fires and accidents in shopping malls, cinemas and other public places despite repeated government promises to improve safety standards.

And forget about drinking water:

Beijing - Contamination of a river in east China by chemical plants upstream has left 200,000 people without water for two days, local media reported Wednesday. Water supplies were cut Monday afternoon in Shuyang county of Jiangsu Province after ammonia and azote polluted the Xinyi River, which originates in Shandong Province, according to Xinhua news agency.

The pollutants detected were about three times the upper limit for drinkable water. The exact cause of the poisoning was still unclear, however waste water from chemical plants upstream were suspected.

Which might explain why some Chinese do this:

Beijing, China (AHN) - In an attempt to gain healing powers, villagers in central China boiled a ton of dinosaur bones into soup or ground them to a powder for traditional medicine. They believe that the bones belong to flying dragons had special powers.

According to AP reports, these fossils were being sold in the Henan province as "dragon bones" at about 4 yuan (50 cents) per kilogram (2.2 pounds). Villagers also feed the calcium-rich bones, boiled with other ingredients to children as a treatment for dizziness and leg cramps.

The practice of grounding the bones to make a paste to apply directly to fractures and other injuries had been going on for at least two decades. In Henan's Ruyang County, scientists have recently excavated a 60-foot-long plant-eating dinosaur, which lived 85 million to 100 million years ago.