You seen this? It seems our favourite Dr. Hollingworth has made another discovery this week. This time the proportions are slightly more mammoth in proportion:
Another interesting fossil invertebrate story today.
This concerns the announcement of the discovery of a section of a 428 million year old Silurian period fossil millipede from Stonehaven in Scotland. This predates the earliest air breathing invertebrate by 20 million years and is therefore of extreme importance in determining when the land was first colonised. Apparantly this millipede was already quite advanced implying that the earliest terrestrial invertebrates had evolved several million years before that.
Clem: I have a copy of "Atlas of Primitive Man in China" which I picke dup secondhand partly due to the rampant nationalism in it - one picture is captioned somehting like "a mamoth tusk that was touched by Chairman Mao" and there is a whole section trying to use palaeontology and palaeoanthropology to prove that Taiwan has always been a part of China - its quite scary when ideology warps science in such a way (anthropology has been most abused but palaeontology has suffered too).
I love that headline "First-ever breathing animal was Scottish"!!
Its a great find - other (less partisan) news here:
There is a beautiful giant millipede on the NE of the Isle of Arran - someone has tried to cut it out with some kind of saw (unsuccessfully thankfully).
Thank you for finding the photos Um... I failed to find any pictures yesterday so I'm pleased you got them. I can only assume that is a camera lucida drawing underneath and it does help to explain what is going on. Given the size of this fragment it seems amazing that this fossil was ever identified at all.
I expect there will be future similar discoveries from the site to come now that paleontologists will be actively looking. I doubt if they will be reported in the popular press like this one though.
Wilson, Heather M. & Anderson, Lyall I. MORPHOLOGY AND TAXONOMY OF PALEOZOIC MILLIPEDES (DIPLOPODA: CHILOGNATHA: ARCHIPOLYPODA) FROM SCOTLAND. Journal of Paleontology 78(1) 169-184 (2004).
Pneumodesmus newmani is just one of the several little buggers they discuss.
Another fantastic find from Scotland! What's going on up there???
Here we have a truly amazing discovery, an early Devonian insect from Rynie in Aberdeenshire that is the oldest ever discovered with wings. This is dated at the early Devonian approx 396-407 mya. That implies that flying developed in the preceding Silurian period.
What a great find Usually that rock would be cracked down the middle and half of the thing would be washed away. Every flat rock I see now will have a plesiosaur on it
More detailed images of the plesiosaur are available at the link below. It transpires, without exaggeration, that this is possibly the most stunning and complete plesiosaur specimen ever found in the UK, and may even have some soft tissue preservation:
It seems that Southern Britain must be twinned with Jurassic Park at the moment! Nothing happens for months then all the announcements come along at once! I'm having a busy time trying to keep abreast of all this stuff.
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