Source: BBC
What is now a dry, harsh mountain desert in south-west Wyoming was once a lush subtropical landscape with lakes, volcanoes and an abundance of wildlife.
In “The Lost World of Fossil Lake”, Lance Grande takes us back more than 50 million years to reveal how North America developed in the period after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
He says that paleontologists always search for “missing links” in natural history, and in Fossil Lake, they find clues as to how today’s world emerged all the time.
Researchers have collected prehistoric remnants from Fossil Butte, one of the world’s richest fossil depots, since the so-called Bone Wars 150 years ago, when Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh raced to become the top paleontologist of their time.
Mr Grande, a lecturer at the University of Chicago and adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, spoke to the BBC about his own decades-long work at the site.
Produced by the BBC’s Sune Engel Rasmussen; edited by Bill McKenna
Every proof for common ancestry of all live form planet earth is also a proof for Islam over Christianity: Darwinian Evolution: Islam or Christianity?
Source: MSN
Oldest bird ever discovered explains evolution from dinosaurs
Scientists discovered this fossil of a 160 million-year-old bird in China. It’s called Aurornis, it’s the earliest bird species ever found, and it simplifies our understanding of how birds split from dinosaurs and developed powered flight. Archaeopteryx, a later species of bird found in the 19th century, was recently categorized as a feathered dinosaur. This complicated things because it could fly, meaning that birds and dinosaurs evolved powered flight at the same time, which didn’t really make much sense. The discovery of Aurornis means that Archaeopteryx was most definitely a bird, providing a much clearer progression from dinosaurs to the birds we know today. Aurornis also shows the beginnings of changes in bone structure that allowed later birds, like Archaeopteryx, to fly.