300 MILLION YEAR "WORLD'S OLDEST OCTOPUS" TURNS OUT TO BE A COUSIN!

300 MILLION YEAR OLD FOSSIL SHOWING WHAT SCIENTIST BELIEVED TO BE THE OLDEST OCTOPUS !

Excerpt: Shockwaves echoed across the scientific community, this week, when what was believed to be the world’s oldest fossil of an octopus, was actually another animal entirely.

The fossil was even featured in the Guinness Book of World Records, dubbing it with the title as the “earliest known octopus,” existing during its lifetime not far from Chicago in today’s landlocked Illinois, USA. They even described it as, “resembling a flattened cow pat or a globular splat, but it possesses eight tentacles, two eyes, and what may be an ink sac – all features characterizing octopuses of today.”


SURFER COM : 300 MILLION YEAR OLD OCTOPUS FOSSIL

Take a look at that fossil!

SUNDALAND LANDMASS ON INDONESIAN SEAFLOOR - 140,000 YEAR OLD HUMAN BONES!

ARCHEOLOGY ORG : 160,000 CITY AT BOTTOM OF SEA - HUMAN BONES! 

Wow!

Excerpt:  Dredging operations in the Madura Strait recovered two fragments of 140,000-year-old H. erectus skull among the fossilized remains of 36 vertebrate species. This now-submerged region was once part of a landmass called Sundaland, which connected the Indonesian archipelago to the Asian mainland during the last Ice Age. These fossils—the first that have ever been retrieved from the seafloor—have provided researchers with important new information about H. erectus’ behavior. 

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DAILY MAIL SCIENCE - HIDDEN CITY BUILT 140,000 YEARS AGO

This one has pictures of the human bones!

MUDLARK by LARA MAIKLEM - SIREN's LINK TO SEA BOOK REVIEW - SEA FOSSILS

What a fascinating book.  For those of you who like to go to the water's edge and see what you can find - besides sea shells and sea weeds washed ashore - this book may inspire you to think ahead about where you can go and why.  Lara Maiklem's hobby as a mudlark, a person who finds things washed up by river tides, has made her an expert about the way the Thames River, the river that goes through the city of London to the ocean, flows.  Most surprising to me was that this is a river that has tides.  With the ebb and flow of the tides, various objects have been deposited, others have no doubt been washed out to sea for hundreds of years. So she and other mudlarkers make it a point of frequently visiting various areas where the river flows to see what has been brought up, what is embedded, and her finds include ancient coins, painted tiles, and a variety of objects like needles, pins, thimbles, and beads, religious objects and weapons.  As most of these objects were made of natural materials - not plastic - they don't threaten the living creatures of those waters so much though of course there is a history of sea creatures becoming extinct over time. It's those creatures though that I want to excerpt about. 

Page 53  Excerpt:  Encased in clay and lying among the gravel on the foreshore are the fossilized remains of the creatures that inhabited those prehistoric seas.  The pencil-like internal shells of belemnites, ancient extinct squid, that swam in shoals over 66 million years ago; bivalves the size and shape of cockles, frozen in stone; and 'devil's toenails', an extinct form of marine oyster that lived in the sediment of the seabed.  At Warden's Point on the Estuary, fossilized crabs, lobsters, shells, twigs, and shark teeth fall from the low cliffs of London clay onto the beach where they can be collected by the handful, and occasionally smoothed pieces of yellow amber will wash ashore where the Estuary and the North Sea mingle. Years ago, before people knew what fossils were, they were shrouded in folklore and assigned all kinds of quasi-religious and mystical associations. One of the most commonly found fossils in the south of England, and along the Thames' foreshore, are echinoids.  The colloquial name for echinoid is 'sea urchin', which comes from the old country name for hedgehog....

OREGON COAST AQUARIUM - LIVE CAMS - SHARKS - OTTERS - SEA BIRDS - FOSSILS

OREGAN COAST AQUARIUM 

Special this summer is FOSSILS.  Go to the site and you can get a SNEAK PEAK.  CRUSIN the FOSSIL COASTLINE will include the art of Alaskan Ray Troll and Dr. Kirk Johnson, paleontologist, will show you the results of a long search for fossils.

Reading about their show, I'm reminded of my geography class.  Learn about volcanoes, land slides, glaciers, ice sheets, and other earth changes that effected the Oregon Coast.

CHIMERA CRAB is 90 MILLION YEARS OLD (SEE THE FOSSIL) and LOOKS CARTOONISH

SCIENCE ALERT - FOSSILIZED CRAB "STRAIGHT OUT OF PIXAR" by Lindsey Bever of the Washington Post 

EXCERPT: This crab sported a tiny lobster-eaque shell, with legs flattened like oars and huge Pound Puppies-style peepers that protruded from its head - a trait that indicates the creature used its eyes actively for whatever it did, researchers said.  But its not only the critter's cartoonish appearance that has some researchers tickled, it's also what the ancient animal means to science.

GLOBAL SEA FLOOR A "VOLCANIC WONDERLAND"

NBC SCIENCE - SEAFLOOR SURVEY - VOLCANIC WONDERLAND  full article including color map and video!

Compared with the previous map, from 1997, the resolution is twice as accurate overall and four times as better in coastal areas and the Arctic, said lead study author David Sandwell, a marine geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

The seafloor topography comes from a gravity model of the ocean, which is in turn based on altimetry from the Jason-1 and Cryosat-2 satellites.

SOLVING DNA OF GREAT WHITE MAY HELP PRESERVE SPECIES

WHOSE YOUR DADDY? GREAT WHITE SHARKS PARENT FOUND  link to Fox News article here!

..."Great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) are the biggest meat-eating shark in the world, with some reaching more than 20 feet long and weighing more than 5,000 pounds. They hunt in more of the world's seas than any other sharks, ranging across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, from the cold waters near the Antarctic to the tropical waters near the equator, cruising up to 43 miles per hour in pursuit of prey.

Their numbers are rapidly declining worldwide, however, mostly because of accidental entanglement in fishing nets.

''You just really don't get fossil sharks preserved this nicely anywhere in the world.'

- Dana Ehret, a vertebrate paleontologist at Monmouth University

The evolutionary history of the great white has been contested by paleontologists for 150 years. They were originally classified as direct relatives of megatooth sharks such as the extinct Carcharocles megalodon, the largest carnivorous shark that ever lived.

Fossils of a newfound species of shark, Carcharodon hubbelli, suggest the modern great white actually may have descended from broad-toothed mako sharks. Researchers say the newfound species represents a possible midway point in the evolution from one to the other."

RARE ANCIENT HORSESHOE CRAB FOSSIL FOUND : TRACKS OF DEATH MARCH IN HUNDRED MILLION YEAR OLD LAGOON

MSNMC reporting. Link to the article and pictures by clicking on the title of this post!