Toothy seabird fossil

The National History Museum in Lima, Peru, now contains the cranium of a pelagornithid, thought to have become extinct close to 3 million years ago. The head of vertebrate paleontology at the museum, Rodolfo Salas, said the fossil is the best-preserved cranium ever found of that species.


Researchers found the skull, which measures 16 inches long, on Peru's dry southern coast. According to Wikipedia, Pelagornithidae looked like albatrosses and had 20-foot wingspans.

Penguin fossils discovered in South America

From CNN:

Picture this: A giant penguin with a long, peculiar beak, lounging in the warm sun.

It could be a promotion for the next animated Hollywood movie.

But this big bird is the real thing, its recently discovered fossils providing researchers with several scientific oddities. Not only are the birds extra large by modern standards, they thrived in one of the warmest periods in the past 65 million years.


"We have this ingrained notion of a penguin on an iceberg in a cool sea. But for most of their long history, penguins were in situations of no ice, with maybe crocodiles near them," said Julia Clarke, assistant professor of marine, earth and atmospheric sciences at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Clarke, who studies the biodiversity of living birds, and colleagues in Peru and Argentina have described two species of extinct penguins that lived tens of millions of years ago. It was during a time when Earth was a lot warmer than it is today. The fossils were found in Peru in 2005.

I'm pleased to see this quote from Clarke, as I agree with her opinion:

So what does a vertebrate paleontologist think about all the attention penguins are now getting with pop culture hits like "March of the Penguins" and "Happy Feet"?

"Anytime people are motivated to engage and become emotionally connected to the natural world is a good thing for conservation concerns," said Clarke.

Fossils of feathered dinosaurs now in Miami

The Miami Science Museum recently opened an exhibit of 120-million-year-old fossils from northeastern China. This is the first appearance of many of the fossils in the United States, and a national tour of "Dinosaurs of China" might follow their May 2008 departure from Miami. The exhibit includes the remains from feathered dinosaurs that supported hypotheses about the origins of birds.

The rarest of finds, and the ones expected to draw scientists from around the country, are in one relatively small room. They are set into chunks of rock, accompanied by life-size models — tiny when compared with the giant dinosaurs nearby — though Lamanna said their understated presentation had no correlation to their importance.

"In terms of evolutionary significance, every single one of those fossils in there is, I'd say, 10 times more important than the giant dinosaurs," he said.

Caudipteryx dinosaur courtesy of Associated Press