What is kept in Museum Cellars?

• A dog-sized dinosaur with a 5 foot tail from the Middle Triassic Period, in other words, one of the world’s earliest dinosaurs has just been described.  The specimen was found in Tanzania 80 years ago and has been in the Natural History Museum, London,  ever since.

• A fossil turtle that has been lost for 150 years has been found in the National Museum of Wales, where it has been in secret residence since 1933.  It was found in the Purbeck area of Dorset and described by Richard Owen, founder of the Natural History Museum, in 1841.  It was donated to Bristolmuseum in 1915 from a private collection, but lent to the Cardiff museum in 1933 and forgotten.  Much of Bristol’s fossil collection was destroyed during a German bombing raid in 1940 and nobody remembered that the turtle had not been in Bristol during the fatal raid.

• A partial skeleton found in the Oxford Clay in Peterborough in the early 1900s has finally been named and described at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.  Tyrannoneustes Lythrodectikos means blood-biting tyrant swimmer.  It is a new genus, part crocodile, part shark, part dolphin – and all charm!  Up to 9 meters long with four paddles for speed and big jaws with serrated teeth, suggesting it could take on and devour animals as big as itself!

Goodbye Jungleyes.

We are sad to say goodbye to one of our longest customers, Jungleyes, formerly of Kew and the Isle of Wight. A great character, he has been ill for a long time, sadly. He will be sorely missed. Below is his obituary from the Daily Telegraph, 11th February 2013.

Rock On Jungleyes - Respect.



11 Feb 2013 – Daily Telegraph Obituary:

Jungleyes Love, who has died aged 56, was an Old Harrovian hippie who traded in runic jewellery, dinosaur eggs and fossilised animal excrement, which he sold from his shop on the tourist trail to Kew Gardens in south-west London.

He learned the tradition of rune-lore in the 1980s. Since the Dark Ages this had been passed down orally by successive female practitioners, a rune being a Norse hieroglyph which, when scribed (or struck) on to an object or metal and its name chanted phonetically, reputedly invests the wearer with power.

His runic jewellery was much sought after by customers at his tiny shop, called World Tree Mend Us, at which he also sold rocks, gemstones and coprolites (fossilised excrement).

Descended from privateers, Charles Gibaut Bissell-Thomas was born in Jersey on March 13 1956. He shed his given name while a teenager, changing it several times, first to Charlight Utang, then Soma Love, then (by deed poll) to Jungleyes Cism Love. More recently he called himself Jarl Love.

During assembly at primary school, he questioned his orthodox Christian headmistress about why the school was not also worshipping the Devil. Later, at Harrow, he contacted the Chinese Embassy and persuaded staff there to send 725 complimentary copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which were promptly returned by the school authorities.

Several terms later his mother received a call from his housemaster stating that he was being sent home in the middle of term, not because he had been expelled but because he contacted the headmaster of Latymer School, Hammersmith, and had secured himself a place.

After entering Latymer he would never cut his hair again, and from his mid-20s no longer brushed or combed it. While perhaps hoping to achieve a neat Rasta-dread style, he ended up with a matted construction which was later long enough to use as a cushion while waiting at bus stops.

After graduating in Neurobiology at the University of Sussex he travelled extensively in Asia, spending several years with a witch doctor (or dukun) in Indonesia called Waktu Lemak (Fat Time).



Jungle — as everyone called him — embraced the psychedelic movement and while many progressed no further than marijuana or LSD, he regularly took the hallucinogenic amanita muscaria (or fly agaric) as used in the Siberian shamanic tradition. For the last 30 years of his life he was a fruitarian . He also refused to be photographed, claiming that the camera would steal his soul.

As well as his shop at Kew, Jungleyes Love also had a second retail outlet in the Victorian Appley Tower, at Ryde on the Isle of Wight – a space that he restored himself.

A notable commission in the early 1990s was from a customer who wanted him to design a pendulum that would enable the buyer to win on the horses (in order to buy a flat with the proceeds). When first employed, the pendulum won the owner £800 but on its second attempt it failed to swing with pertinence and was returned with instructions to replace silver with gold. This Love did, also adding part of a prehistoric pony’s kneecap.

The pendulum was ready for the following year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup, when the owner formed two circles of runners’ names from the racecard. The first circle produced no movement in the pendulum, but when the second did — and the owner placed his initial £800 winnings on the horse indicated — he won £33,000.

Despite spending prolifically on exotic fruits, Jungleyes Love became one of the few European sufferers from beriberi, his fruitarian diet being deficient in vitamin B. In 2007 an abscess infected with TB (probably lying dormant since his Asian travels) was removed from his brain. The operation led to complications, which left him needing care during his last years .

Jungleyes Love, who was unmarried, is survived by his mother, brother and two sisters.

Jungleyes Love, born March 13 1956, died February 2 2013

Charles Darwin, Victorian Polymath and Fossil Fancier!

Highlights from Fossils, Finches and Fuegians, an account of Charles Darwin’s travels on The Beagle by his great grandson, Richard Keynes.




Charlie as a student:

“No pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their characters…I will give a proof of my zeal: one day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw 2 rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so I popped the one I held in the right hand into my mouth. Alas,it ejected some intensely acrid fluid so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one.

I was very successful in collecting and invented 2 new methods: I employed a labourer to scrape moss off old trees and place it in a large bag and likewise to collect the rubbish at the bottom of barges in which reeds are bought from the fens, and thus I got some very rare species.

No poet ever felt more delight at seeing his first poem published than I did at seeing in Stephen’s ‘Illustrations of British Insects’, the magic words: ’captured by Charles Darwin, Esq’”



Resolutions at the start of the voyage:

“I am afraid I shall be quite overwhelmed with the number of subjects which I ought to take into hand. The principal objects are first collecting, observing and reading in all branches of Natural History that I can possibly manage. Observations in Meteorology, French and Spanish, Mathematics and a little Classics, perhaps not more than Greek testament on Sundays…how great and uncommon an opportunity of improving myself”



Curation:

The untidy piles of fossils dumped by Charles on the spotless decks of the Beagle were wholly contrary to naval tradition: ”Wickham, the First Lieutenant -a very tidy man who liked to keep the decks so that you could eat your dinner off them - used to say, ’If I had my way, all your damn mess would be chucked overboard, and you after it, old flycatcher.’



While in the Falklands:

“I am quite charmed with Geology but, like the wise animal between two bundles of hay, I do not know which to like best, the old crystalline groups of rocks or the softer and fossiliferous beds. When puzzling about stratification etc... I feel inclined to cry a fig for your big oysters and your bigger Megatheriums. But, when digging out some fine bones I wonder how any man can tire his arms with hammering granite……

There is nothing like geology; the pleasure of the first day’s partridge shooting or first day’s hunting cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue.”



Leaving Tahiti:

“In nothing have I been so much pleased as with the inhabitants - there is a mildness in the expression of their faces which at once banishes the idea of a savage -and an intelligence which shows they are advancing in civilization…in my opinion they are the finest men I have ever beheld.”



Leaving New Zealand:

“I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand; it is not a pleasant place; amongst the natives there is absent the charming simplicity which is found at Tahiti, and of the English the greater part are the very refuse of society. Neither is the country itself attractive.”



Leaving Australia:

“Farewell Australia, you are a rising infant and will doubtless some day reign a great princess in the south; but you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect; I leave your shores without sorrow or regret.”



About coming home:

“I am in high spirits about my geology and even aspire to the hope that my observations will be considered of some utility by real geologists. I see very clearly it will be necessary to live in London for a year, by which time, with hard work, the greater part of my materials will be exhausted. Will you tell Erasmus to put my name down to the Wyndham or any other club…or to turn in his mind for some lodgings with big rooms in some vulgar part of London.”



Shortly after coming home and years before working on, ‘The Origin of Species’, he read a paper to the Geological Society about the elevation of the coastline of Chile, followed by a paper entitled: ’On the connexion of certain volcanic phenomena in South America and the formation of mountain chains and volcanoes as an effect of the same power by which continents are elevated’.

This was received with polite respect and forgotten shortly afterwards. It was not until the 1960s, when the theory of plate tectonics caused a revolution in geological thought, that it could be appreciated how accurate Darwin’s theories had been.

May you live and prosper beyond the 22nd December and enjoy a good 2013. Simon Cohen.

Sept 12

Dr Alexander Kellner of Rio de Janeiro University was arrested recently with over 200 fossil insects in his suitcase at a local airport in Brazil.

What makes this especially ironic is that this deceitful doc is one of the most militant voices shouting for possession of fossils in Brazil to be made illegal.

As soon as a test case a couple of years ago found that there were no laws covering fossils and that a law concerning artifacts had been misapplied, perfidious Prof Kellner and his chums brought in a law in Brazil specifically making ownership of fossils illegal.

After organizing a whip-round with his colleagues the abhorrent academic was able to fork out a modest sum for bail, equivalent to 10 times the minimum wage.

I am told that the way it works in Brazil is that the case will be buried for some years and then the punishment will be minimal, given his social position and ability to hire a halfway decent lawyer. (…is there such a thing as a ‘decent lawyer’?...)

Dr. David Martill of Portsmouth University fingered the blackguardly boffin years ago at a public symposium at Manchester University in the 90s.  When Dr. Besterman of Manchester held up the Brazilian model as the way forward for maintaining academic control of a country’s ‘fossil resource’, he was shot down in flames by Dr. Martill, who said he had been to Brazil to study fossils and was told by Dr. Kellner that possession of all Brazilian fossils was illegal but he would be happy to sell him anything he wanted..

Bad language was employed concerning Drs. Kellner and Besterman to the accompaniment of cheers and boos.

This is all so sad and unnecessary as the fish and insect fauna of the Crato and Santanna formations are prolific and extensive.

As long as there is no incentive to get the fossils out of the ground information is lost to science and employment opportunities in a poor part of the country are lost.

One of this country’s ‘media dinosaur experts’ sold a self collected slab of bones  from the Yorkshire Coast  to the Ulster Museum for £3000 ten years ago that he identified as Pterosaur bones.  This would have been a fair price, except that it has just been re-examined by a research student and it is quite clearly a fish and by no stretch of the imagination does it have any resemblance to a pterosaur!!!

Here is another example of a specialist straying from his area of expertise:

The head of a prestigious northern museum whose expertise is Silurian pollen and spores identified a fossil bought in by a member of the public as a Dactilioceras ammonite from Dorset despite the fact that it was found in Upper Carboniferous rocks in Yorkshire!

This crafty curator explained that the Jurassic ammonite must have been dumped in the coal measures by someone trying to pull a fast one….

The fossil was actually a Gastrioceras goniotite which is a well-known zone fossil from the Yorkshire coal measures…..and you do not get Dactilioceras from Dorset but from the Yorkshire Coast!

Shortly after the publication of the Dorling Kindersley Fossils Guide in 2000, fossils that were photographed in the book started to disappear from the Natural History Museum ‘as if they were stolen to order from a catalogue’

A foreign research student was suspected at the time but none of the missing fossils were ever retrieved.

You would think the matter would have been forgotten by now but I first heard of it earlier this year in Tucson where various collectors were discussing whether they had seen the pieces in various collections.

It was also rumoured that around the same time a front of house manager had been caught with his fingers in the till.  To avoid publicity and embarrassment, he was retired with a golden handshake.

Must see films…if you really have nothing better to do: The Boss by James Everingham ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_NeFyUEW3M )  in which my 14 year old son and some of his chums beat each other up in and around the Fossils warehouse.

T Rex loves Oranges ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pq84KESsmw ) in which a silly robotic dinosaur and a silly human have a meaningful dialogue about table manners.

Million Dollar Moon Rock Heist - soon to be on the National Geographic Channel, in which a Mormon fantasist nicks fossils and moonrock and attempts to sell them on EBay. A true story. The shelves of my warehouse double as the Utah Natural History Museum where one of the heinous crimes takes place.

Harvey Nichols, the London fashion store, are knocking out silk vests and scarves with designs taken from enlarged microscopic images of fossils and minerals. Their creator, Professor of Architecture at Cardiff University, Richard Weston, also produces BIG wall hangings and carpets and has held exhibitions of his work all over the world.   Check him out on http://www.westonearthimages.com/

Massive fossil fleas, with weapon-like serrated proboscii, have been discovered in Jurassic rocks in China. They are 8TIMES the size of their modern counterparts…nearly 1 inch long!!!  However their legs were not as developed as modern fleas so they crawled rather than hopped.  Most of the mammals of the period were shrew sized creatures so it is presumed the fleas lived off (and on) the feathered dinosaurs found in the same rocks.

Researchers at Bristol University found that a 24 foot long Pliosaur from Wiltshire suffered with painful arthritis in its massive 6 foot long jaws. The 150 million year old predator put up with a crooked bite for years before its jaw finally snapped, no doubt causing the animal’s death from hunger Palaeontologists have always been puzzled by the period between 360 and 345 million years ago, christened Romers Gap after an influential American Prof.
There was no activity on land before this period, nothing much was found anywhere during this period and then out of the blue plenty of land creatures are found.  It was suggested that low levels of oxygen during this period limited evolution on land…

Until legendary fossil finder, Mr Stan Wood, put on his waders and closed the gap by finding a large diversity of amphibians, plants, fish and invertebrates in a river bed in Berwickshire.  A selection of 20 of these fossils are now on special exhibition at the Royal Scottish museum in Edinburgh.  They are not very dramatic to look at but are of immense scientific importance, showing that animals with 5 fingers and toes appeared 20 million years earlier than previous estimates.

The exhibition is also a fitting recognition of Stan’s excellent work in finding, analysing and documenting Fossils.  Former merchant seaman and insurance salesman, Stan Wood has been a professional collector since 1968 and has upset as many academics as he has delighted by his successes. He has found over 3 dozen new species including the earliest known Tetrapod in Europe (and possibly the world) and some sharks with very strange sexual appendages. What a star.

The fossil of a monster, 5 foot tall, Penguin, from the late Eocene period has been found in Peru. There is some preservation of its feathers, which, unlike modern penguins, appeared to be grey and reddish brown.


Possible evidence of the ‘Great Oxidation Event’ 2.4 billion years ago, that resulted in a rise in atmospheric oxygen that jumpstarted life on earth, has been found by French researchers in Gabon.
Using x-ray microtomography they claim to have identified microscopic colonial organisms in 2.4 billion year old rocks.


Zhejiang Museum of Natural History, China, has purchased a unique fossil, found by a local farmer of a pterosaur lying next to a fossil egg. It is assumed that the pterosaur laid the egg.
Subsequent research suggests that pterosaurs behaved more like reptiles than birds when it comes to laying and looking after eggs. Current theory is that they buried their eggs and left them unlike birds who invest considerable energy in incubating their eggs.
The egg itself had a relatively soft parchment like shell, which was not strongly mineralised.


Four upper cheek teeth and two lower incisors are evidence of the first fossil porcupines to be found in Iran. They date from the late Miocene.


How about this for bad translation: from the tourist brochure for the Lascaux Cave Paintings in France, ‘A highly technological achievement and a strictly scientific approach allowed a restitution of the deep emotion given by the most famous Palaeolithic sanctuary in the world’…The Dutch version sounds even sillier.


A set of tracks from marine sediments in Poland from the early Devonian period (395 million years) are upsetting established beliefs about the chronology of life emerging from the sea onto land. The tracks are 18 million years older than any known Tetrapods (the first true land creatures) and 10 million years older than the first known fish to use its lobefins to scoot overland from one pool to another.
The largest print was 26cms suggesting an animal 2.5 meters in length.


The recent discovery of a 4.4 million year old primate skeleton from Ethiopia is causing considerable debate about human origins.
Ardipithecus-Ardie for short-has been describes as ‘evolutions’ bad girl’ as she upsets some long held beliefs about human evolution. This primate had the appearance of an early hominid-large body, chimpanzee-like hands and feet, flattened face and upright stance and seemed equally at home in the trees as with both feet on the ground.
Ardie was a four-foot tall adult, weighed 110lbs,had a chimpanzee sized brain (smaller than Lucy) and lived in the forest.
Her small canines were capable of grinding seeds, fruit and insects.
Don’t give up on the Royal Scottish Museum if you visit Edinburgh, like I nearly did.
The modest but significant fossil display is housed in the poorly lit basement of the weird new building, a maze of corridors and dead ends.
I almost gave up at this point but stumbled by chance in to the old museum, which is an absolute joy, a grand Victorian edifice on 3 floors with a huge glass roof. It’s full of STUFF and fossils and minerals are to be found in a number of places, which adds to the thrill of discovery.
Kids, small or grown-up, will love it.


Treasures of the December Bonham’s Natural History Auction in December include a 6.25” T Rex tooth (estimate $2500), a small but complete Protoceratops skeleton (estimate$150000+) a Diplomistus fish trying to swallow a Priscacara fish
(estimate $15000+), a big sabre tooth cat skull (estimate$50000+) a fossil camel leg bone from the La Brea tar pits(Estimate $1000)and some Siberian mammoth hair
(estimate $600+).


Workers at a limestone quarry making tiles at Nuovo Ollinde, Brazil used to enjoy a mildly lucrative pastime of fossil collecting from economically useless beds above the tile layer. Many new species of insects have been found and described from there
Since new laws have been passed making private fossil collecting illegal and ceding possession of all fossils to the state, workers have been ordered by the management to throw away anything they find.


Last July’s episode of New Tricks an ITV detective series called Old Fossil reinvestigated the death of a particularly sleazy curator at the Natural History Museum. Did he fall or was he pushed…or was he bludgeoned to death with a dinosaur bone? Was he drunk, as usual? Had he seduced one postgrad student too many? Was an ex employee covering up his thefts that funded his upmarket fossil gallery and had he been secretly living in the cellars of the museum to escape the notice of the cops…. All fiction of course.


If you missed the most complete display of Archaopteryx specimens brought together under one roof at the Munich Mineral show 2 years ago you can see it a t The National Museum of Wales in Cardiff until March.

May 2011

A piece of ‘moon rock’ on display for the last 40 years at theRijksmuseum in Amsterdam was actually a piece of fossil wood.
It was presented to the nation during a world tour by Neil Armstrong.


For the first time experts have been able to determine the sex of a flying reptile after the discovery of a fossil from Liaoning Province,north east China,with the egg she was about to lay.
This pterosaur had no head crest so it is reasonable to deduct that pterosaurs with head crests are male.They also,predictably,have smaller hips.
Some head crests were particularly spectacular so the team at Leicester University that carried out the study deduced they were as likely to be used for display to attract mates as to ward off other males.


The ability to stand upright was a major step in our evolution that probably allowed us to develop bigger brains.
When this happened has been under debate as the skeleton of Lucy(Australopithicus afarensis) lacked crucial footbones.
A single metatarsal(foot bone)connecting the fourth toe to the ankle of one of Lucy’s 3.2 million year old contemporaries has been found and it seems to confirm that Australopithecus spent most of its time upright.
The bone shows signs of an arch which could absorb shock and bear the weight of an animal that stood upright for long periods.It is stiffer than those found in most apes’ flexible handlike feet which are designed for gripping branches and climbing.
Climate cooling 3 million years ago caused the dense lush forests of eastern Africa to give way to grasslands where walking would have been a more useful skill than climbing.


In order to preserve the unique Precambrian fossils of Charnwood Forest,Leicestershire from the ravages of natural erosion and the occasional climber, Natural England(they used to be English Nature which used to be the Nature Conservancy Council)and the British Geological Survey have made a150 square meter mould of some of the fossils.
This is reckoned to be the largest 2 dimensional fossil mould in the world(so far).
It is twice the size of a recent mould of Precambrian fossils made at Mistaken Point in Canada and much larger than mould taken recently of blocks weighing several tons at The Wren’s Nest,Dudley,Worcestershire.



Hats off to The Eden Project for being so polite and engaging…also for being a cracking day out,especially the Tropical Dome on a cold day.
On a recent visit I noticed an ammonite has been wrongly dated to the tune of 15 million years so I emailed them.I received a grateful and appreciative reply almost immediately.
I remember telling the Royal Festival Hall that a spectacular fossil shell group in their lobby donated by their neighbours Shell Petroleum was ludicrously wrongly dated…by perhaps 100 million years if memory serves.
I never got an acknowledgement from them but I noticed on a recent visit that they now display the correct information.


My book of the week is’Boneheads.My Search for T Rex’ by Richard Polsky, an entertaining account of fossil dealers and diggers in America..
In this extract he describes a gathering of fossil dealers at the Tucson Show:”It dawned on me that few dealers were as intriguing as their fossils.The scene was male dominated with beer bellies galore.Many dealers were in desperate need of a shower and a shave.Most wore jeans.Shoes were either work boots or inexpensive cowboy boots.Overall they were a scruffy lot,but a few dapper merchants sported western shirts with bolo ties,one with a real scorpion encased in a clear plastic clasp.”

I like to think I raise the tone myself with my hawaian shirts and Birkenstocks.

The book mentions many of the fossil guys that I have known for years so I have to recommend it.
I mention no names but…
.
one T rex finder nearly drowned with me canoing in Colorado

another who may have served an undeserved jail sentence after finding the best T Rex in the world worked for me one morning setting up my display because his young helpers who should have been working for me that morning were all too hung over to wake up

I saved the marriage of another by finding the valuable wedding ring he dropped in a restaurant a week before his wedding.His wife of 15 years never knew.

The proprietor of a major private dinosaur museum mentioned in the book discovered coriander and pomegranit soup at my dinner table.(Recipe available on request from Mrs.Cohen)

I saved a prominent dinosaur egg specialist mentioned in the book from a good kicking in central America by driving off muggers by trying to poke my lit cigarette in their eyes.(Smoking can sometimes be good for your health…but I have given up the habit now)

I have frequently slaughtered another dino eggman featured in the book at Table Tennis.

The Manhatten shopkeeper and auction consultant gave my wife and I a ghastly tour of his basement where insects were busy stripping the flesh off dead animals before their skeletons went on sale in the shop.In return I took him to some gruesome bars in Munich when the Munich rock show was on.



On the subject of Tucson :this years’ highlights included a stunning 20foot Ichthyosaur giving birth with babies inside and outside her body($500,000+)and an equally large and pricey german Jurassic cocodile,also on matrix.Ideal for the wall in your study(if your study is the size of a small cinema)Mounted skeletons of a plesiosaur and a mosasaur from Morocco were also pretty spectacular.As was a complete mounted skeleton of a Florida Pleistocene sloth….a placque with about 30 turtles ,all with cute little heads and feet poking out of their shells also took my fancy.

Twent years ago when Japan’s economy was booming their museums were the major customers for such pieces.Korean museums made their appearance in the market about 10 years ago and predictably a Chinese museum or two is starting to spend some money on major pieces.


If you want a fossil named after you get in touch with |Dr.David Penney of Siri Scientific Press.
He frequently finds new species of insects in amber which he gets to publish and name.
This is an expensive activity for him.Not only is it a labour of love but in order for his work to be published he has to donate said specimens to a museum.
So he is happy to name any new species after anyone prepared to pay him and has advertised this service on ebay.



You have to visit Venice once in your life and if you do(as I did recently)the Natural History museum there is worth a visit,especially if you have children in tow(… and yes it does have one of my fossils on diplay)
It is housed in an elegant Palazzo and is extremely well signposted from all directions.
The story of its patron reflects the merchant adventurer spririt of Venice.
John Carlo Ligabue’s father was a poor venetian who earned his money on the water and gradually built up a successful business supplying all the needs of the cruise boats that visit Venice.His son studied marine biology before going into the business and making it even more successful…His office is on the edge of old Venice and has3,yes 3 parking spaces.That is real wealth in Venice!
As patron of the museum he went on expeditions to exotic places such as Mongolia,New Guinea and Mali.The dinosaurs he collected there 20 years before anyone was collecting fossils in Morocco are proudly displayed.
He has also established scholarship projects all over the world.
The real charm of the museum is that it posseses and proudly displays proper old fashion dead animals.Lots of them,from an era before political correctness . Kids love
All that gruesome stuff..
As well as a fine fossil collection there are ethnographical African collections(lots of weapons),stuffed animals big and small and all sorts of things in bottles of formaldehyde.
You can only take in so much art,even in Venice.Give it a go.


A new discovery of well preserved new to science fossils from the ediocaran period(about 565 million years) has been made in Newfoundland.These particularly weird early lifeforms were probably tethered to the sea floor.They resemble nothing at all that exists today.


The earliest known Australian bird fossil remains have been found in lower cretaceous sediments of South East Australia,pushing evidence of bird life in the area back by 10 million years.This area would have been inside the Antarctic circle at the time which meant the bird would have to have survived minus temperatures and 3 months of continual darkness


Living among the enormous marsupial wolves,giant rat kangaroos and monster possums of the Australian Pleistocene was a giant tortoise that weighed over 500 kgs and had big spikes on its head and tail.


289 gastroliths were found in and around a nearly complete 32 foot long plesiosaur from Southern Utah.This is unusual but not unique.


In order to study Mosasaur tooth variation Marcus Ross of Rhode Island University accessed 1800 museum and private collections from Europe,Asia,Antartica,Africa,New Zealand and North and South America.


The oldest fossil aphid yet known has been found in middle Triassic sediments(220 million yrs)in Shaanxi province,China.It is 14mm long(big for an aphid!)


A complete skeleton of a new type of therapod dinosaur has been found at Ghost Ranch,New Mexico.It is about 215 million years old,when dinosaurs were still finding their feet.Fossils have been found at Ghost Ranch for over 100 years.
It is called Taura halla after the Hopi sun god and Ruth Hall who found the first fossils at Ghost Ranch.


Pterosaur tracks have been found for the first time in Alaska.


With the help of an electric micrographit has been possible to determine the original colour of feathers preserved as brown and black stains on a new dinosaur from Liaoning ,China.The crown was brownish red,the long limb feathers were white with black spangles and the body was dark grey with found red speckles.The conclusion was that colour evolved to play a role in sexual selection or other communication.


An exceptionally well preserved nearly complete three dimensional bird like dinosaur about 160 million years old has just been found inJingjiang,China.It is about 2 metres long,including tail and thought to be that of a young adult.It is older than Archaeopteryx and reinforces the premise that birds arose from dinosaurs.It is also 60 million years older thab similar birdlike dinosaurs.



There are only 4 known locations where fossil trees are preserved in upright postions:
Queen Elizabeth Island in arctic Canada,the Rhein valley near Bonn,Germany,Dunarobba in Umbria,Italy andBukkabrany,Hungary(discovered in 2007).
Drawings of the ian wood were made shortly after their discovery in 1620.100 years later they were bought by Geoge 111 and are now housed in Windsor Castle library.


A new lower Jurassic sauropod dinosaur skull has been found in South Africa.More than 80 similar skulls have been found in the past and are in south African and English museums.


How about this for an exciting title:Chaniella,a new lower Tremadocian brachiopod from northwestern Argentina and its phylogenic relationships with basal Rhynconelliforms published by Palaontologische Zeitshrift vol83 no3 pages393-405.
Makes you want read more !


Here is another one:’Dessert Sharks’-a story of fossil hunting in the Peruvain wilderness.

The Tulley Monster was named after its finder Francis Tulley.The first specimen was found in an ironstone nodule from Mazon Creek,Indiana ,an area of abandoned coal mines,in 1958.There is no agreement about the nature of the beast-possible worm,squid or shellless gastropod.A Norwegian palaeontologist has pointed out that Tull means nonsense in Norwegian.
It is now the state fossil of Illinois.