Close up views of the heat-treated fossiliferous chalcedony core debitages. A lot of small fossils & fragments, with some small crinoid sections.
The Wetherington Island site was primarily an Archaic period lithic quarry where natives mined & partially reduced chert, chalcedony & agatized coral so they could transport the blanks elsewhere. Thermally altered lithic material probably represented <2% of the recovered artifacts. 2/ #Archaeology #fossils #FossilFriday #lithics
#NewSpecies!
New ordovician coiled cephalopod from #germany just came in:
Trocholites vortex
Treatment: https://treatment.plazi.org/id/03AD87B1-DD3B-4252-311D-9EB4940BFDCF
Publication: https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2025.982.2843
#ejtaxonomy #TrocholitesVortex
#FAIRdata
#science #OA #openaccess #biology #taxonomy #ecology #biodiversity #nature #wildlife #conservation #animals #malacology #cephalopods #fossils #paleo #paleontology #ordovician
Scientists from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland are arguing that the massive and mysterious tubelike fossils known as "prototaxites" deserve their own life form classification because, basically, they're too weird to belong to any other. @Futurism has more, including why prototaxites have long been a head-scratcher and a point of contention for scientists who to this day cannot figure out their nature:
Also, I forgot to mention this great Common Descent episode about decomposers:
https://commondescentpodcast.com/2025/03/15/episode-213-decomposers/
newest episode of Common Descent is about saber teeth!
They cover everything from Smilodon to Nimravids to Gorgonopsians to fanged deer (although not Hoplitomeryx)! Even Uintatherium gets a mention. Covers recent research on why Smilodon's canines would have been visible when the mouth was closed, while Homotherium's canines would have been concealed when the mouth was closed.
https://commondescentpodcast.com/2025/03/29/episode-214-saber-teeth/
Tons of crinoid stem sections & brachiopods in brown chert pebble from the Citronelle formation, Southeast Louisiana. #FossilFriday #Fossils
Ever since their discovery more than 165 years ago, massive fossilized structures left by an organism known as Prototaxites approximately 400 years ago have proven impossible to categorize.
Researchers in the UK suggest in a report (yet to be peer reviewed) that Protaxites are a type of organism with no modern equivalent
https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-giants-may-be-a-whole-new-kind-of-life-that-no-longer-exists
Workers uncover 'weird' dinosaur in the Gobi Desert. What do we know?
By Charmayne Allison and Sohani Goonetillake
Scientists say the Duonychus is like a "giant feathered sloth" with "big, sharp and nasty claws".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-26/weird-dinosaur-unearthed-in-gobi-desert/105097288
Workers uncover 'weird' dinosaur in the Gobi Desert. What do we know?
By Charmayne Allison and Sohani Goonetillake
Scientists say the Duonychus is like a "giant feathered sloth" with "big, sharp and nasty claws".
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-26/weird-dinosaur-unearthed-in-gobi-desert/105097288
Fossil of ancient crustacean gathering reveals new insights into their lives
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2025/march/fossil-ancient-crustacean-gathering-reveals-new-insights-into-their-lives.html
Gregarious behaviour in #Carboniferous cyclidan #crustaceans https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0734
"With legs emerging from underneath rounded shells, #cyclidans looked not unlike an underwater beetle. Earliest species were a few mm in size and form #fossils that look like a tiny bunch of grapes. Over millions of years they evolved larger species, and by the #Triassic they were about as wide as a human hand"
Sand-sized fossils hold secrets to the history of climate change…
Between 18,000 and 11,000 years ago, the amount of #carbondioxide in the #atmosphere suddenly shot up. This caused rapid global warming, the mass melting of #glaciers, and the end of the last ice age... #climatechange #globalwarming #photosynthesis #fossils #southernocean #iceage
You Can Make Amber Fossils in 24 Hours, Instead of Millions of Years - Paleontologists hope that an amber-like material, made with living tree resin, will shed ... - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/24/science/amber-fossils-synthetic.html #scientificreports(journal) #your-feed-science #paleontology #research #fossils #amber
7- Once you have the scan, you can make replicas of your fossils by 3D printing them! Here a fossil predentary, along with the 3D scan.
Thank you to the presenters for doing such a good job, the organizers for putting this together, and the participants for making it all possible! This was an amazing way to end the Paleo 2025 symposium, and we can't wait to see you all next year!
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To cap off an amazing weekend, Dr. Emily Bamforth and Jackson Sweder from the Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum along with Atharva Roy presented on 3D scanning and printing of fossils! We learnt how 3D scans are made and used to advance the field of palaeontology. We saw demonstrations of the structured light scanner and then created our own low-cost, easy photogrammetry scans using an app on our smartphones!
1- The presenters!
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#palaeontology #paleontology #fossils #alberta #ab #yyc
#lawsuits #paleontology #fossils #archives #ouch
"A professor said the North Jersey university where he works lost his collection of 380 million-year-old fossils. In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, paleontologist Martin Becker accuses William Paterson University in Wayne of negligence in caring for the fossils, which he was trying to ship to a colleague in Florida. They ended up in a landfill instead, he said."
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