This has been a big week for James!
He said “beep” the other day (but not repeated the feat) and today he decided he wanted to walk.
Grandpa was over and he just started walking. he’s been trying for weeks, but he’s only managed 2 “steps” before collapsing.
Today he just started with 3 steps at a time and worked his way up to crossing the living room.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Family, Kids
Jurassic beaver swims into view - Large early mammal was first to get furry. From nature.com
Ever see the cliché ending to virtually every program on the extinction of the dinosaurs where the Tyrannosaurus Rex skull lies in the sand with the mouse-like mammal crawling out its eye socket?
Until now, the fossil record has only yielded small, shrew-like mammals living during the Mesozoic Era (Triassic, Jurassic & Cretaceous periods). The assumption has been that dinosaurs so completely dominated that era mammals were unable to thrive until the following Cenozoic era.
This new find out of China is an amazingly advanced beaver from Jurassic period China.
While this certainly means a re-think of when mammals began their advance towards world-dominance this doesn’t seem as surprising to me. Prior to the Mesozoic, during the Paleozoic, the earth was dominated by creatures known as the Mammal-like reptiles (Therapsids). These were displaced during the Triassic by dinosaurs and apparently gone by the Jurassic, but they are the direct ancestors of mammals. It doesn’t seem that impossible that mammals had more of a head start than previously thought.
The process of fossilization requires being at the right place at the right time, and some places (rivers, seas, oceans) are more conducive than others. Further, those places now have to be exposed. There are certainly far more creatures that did exist than we could ever possibly expect to find.
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Many Dino Fossils Could Have Soft Tissue Inside from the National Geographic Society
This is a fascinating report concerning the “fossilized” soft tissue discovered last year.
The traditional view of the fossilization process should result in no soft tissue remaining.
In a nutshell, when a creature dies, it’s soft tissue rots (or is eaten) away, leaving the bones and hard parts, which then get covered and slowly mineral-laden water erodes them replacing them with rock in, essentially, and exact replica so exact that you can see the original growth rings, etc.
Only on the rarest of occasions does soft tissue or skin imprints get fossilized, but they, too, are converted to mineral in the process.
The discovery last year yielded what appears to be un-mineralized soft tissue. After a year’s research, the team has discovered this may not be as rare as previously thought, and if so, the whole process of fossilization may have to be re-thought.
Technorati Tags: Blog, Paleontology, Science