|
Kambara District, Niigata
''Kambara'' is an extinct genus of mekosuchine crocodylian that lived during the Eocene epoch in Australia. Description At around 55 million years old, remains of ''Kambara'' are among the oldest Tertiary fossils found in Australia (although there are some recent Cretaceous fossils that are twice that age). ''Kambara'' is the oldest known mekosuchine. The genus name comes from an Aboriginal term meaning "crocodile". There are currently four species of ''Kambara'' described: the type species ''K. murgonensis'' (Willis & Molnar, 1993), ''K. implexidens'' (Salisbury & Willis, 1996), ''K. molnari'' (Holt et al., 2005), and ''K. taraina'' (Buchanan, 2009). All four species have a generalised crocodylian body plan, growing to sizes similar to the modern Saltwater Crocodile, ''Crocodylus porosus''. ''Kambara'' shows an interesting characteristic of having multiple bite patterns within the same genus. ''Kambara murgonensis'' has a near complete overbite, ''K. implexidens'' a more interl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Melbourne Museum
The Melbourne Museum is a natural and cultural history museum located in the Carlton Gardens, Melbourne, Carlton Gardens in Melbourne, Australia. Located adjacent to the Royal Exhibition Building, the museum was opened in 2000 as a project of the Government of Victoria, on behalf of Museums Victoria which administers the venue. The museum won Best Tourist Attraction at the Australian Tourism Awards in 2011. In addition to its galleries, the museum features spaces such as ''Curious?'', which is a place to meet staff and find answers relating to the collections, research, and behind-the-scenes work of Museums Victoria; as well as a cafe and a gift shop. The back-of-house area houses some of the Victoria's State Collections, which holds over 17 million items, including objects relating to Indigenous Australian and Pacific Islander cultures, geology, historical studies, palaeontology, technology and society, and zoology, as well as a library collection that holds 18th and 19th cent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tip Dating
Tip dating is a technique used in molecular dating that allows the inference of time-calibrated phylogenetic trees. Its defining feature is that it uses the ages of the samples to provide time information for the analysis, in contrast with traditional 'node dating' methods that require age constraints to be applied to the internal nodes of the evolutionary tree. In tip dating, morphological data and molecular data are typically analysed together to estimate the evolutionary relationships (tree topology) and the divergence times among lineages (node times); this approach is also known as 'total-evidence dating'. However, tip dating can also be used to analyse data sets that only comprise morphological characters or that only comprise molecular characters (e.g., data sets that include samples of ancient DNA or of serially sampled viruses). Tip dating has been implemented in Bayesian phylogenetic software and typically draws on the fossilised birth-death model for evolution. This ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alligator White Background
An alligator is a large reptile in the Crocodilia order in the genus ''Alligator'' of the family Alligatoridae. The two extant species are the American alligator (''A. mississippiensis'') and the Chinese alligator (''A. sinensis''). Additionally, several extinct species of alligator are known from fossil remains. Alligators first appeared during the Oligocene epoch about 37 million years ago. The name "alligator" is probably an anglicized form of ', the Spanish term for "the lizard", which early Spanish explorers and settlers in Florida called the alligator. Later English spellings of the name included ''allagarta'' and ''alagarto''. Evolution Alligators and caimans split in North America during the early Tertiary or late Cretaceous (about 53 million to about 65 million years ago). The Chinese alligator split from the American alligator about 33 million years ago and probably descended from a lineage that crossed the Bering land bridge during the Neogene. The moder ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alligatoroidea
Alligatoroidea is one of three superfamilies of crocodylians, the other two being Crocodyloidea and Gavialoidea. Alligatoroidea evolved in the Late Cretaceous period, and consists of the alligators and caimans, as well as extinct members more closely related to the alligators than the two other groups. Evolution The superfamily Alligatoroidea is thought to have split from the crocodile-gharial lineage in the late Cretaceous, about 80 million years ago, but possibly as early as 100 million years ago based on molecular phylogenetics. ''Leidyosuchus'' of Alberta is the earliest known genus. Fossil alligatoroids have been found throughout Eurasia as land bridges across both the North Atlantic and the Bering Strait have connected North America to Eurasia during the Cretaceous, Paleogene, and Neogene periods. Alligators and caimans split in North America during the early Tertiary or late Cretaceous (about 53 million to about 65 million years ago) and the latter reached South Ameri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crocodylia
Crocodilia (or Crocodylia, both ) is an order of mostly large, predatory, semiaquatic reptiles, known as crocodilians. They first appeared 95 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period (Cenomanian stage) and are the closest living relatives of birds, as the two groups are the only known survivors of the Archosauria. Members of the order's total group, the clade Pseudosuchia, appeared about 250 million years ago in the Early Triassic period, and diversified during the Mesozoic era. The order Crocodilia includes the true crocodiles (family Crocodylidae), the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), and the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae). Although the term 'crocodiles' is sometimes used to refer to all of these, crocodilians is a less ambiguous vernacular term for members of this group. Large, solidly built, lizard-like reptiles, crocodilians have long flattened snouts, laterally compressed tails, and eyes, ears, and nostrils at the top of t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mekosuchinae
Mekosuchinae is an extinct clade of crocodilians from the Cenozoic of Australasia. They first appear in the fossil record in the Eocene in Australia, and survived until the arrival of humans: in the Pleistocene in Australia and within the Holocene in the Pacific islands of Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu. Mekosuchine crocodiles are a diverse group. One of the last species, ''Mekosuchus inexpectatus'' from Holocene New Caledonia, may have been arboreal. The early Miocene species '' Harpacochampsa camfieldensis'' may have resembled a false gharial. Another mekosuchine fossil, currently undescribed, has been found in Miocene deposits from New Zealand. One genus, ''Mekosuchus'', managed to spread to the islands of the Pacific; it is believed to have island-hopped across the Coral Sea, moving first to a now submerged island known as Greater Chesterfield Island, then New Caledonia and onwards. In the Pleistocene, ''Quinkana'' was one of the top terrestrial predators of the Australian ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cladogram
A cladogram (from Greek ''clados'' "branch" and ''gramma'' "character") is a diagram used in cladistics to show relations among organisms. A cladogram is not, however, an evolutionary tree because it does not show how ancestors are related to descendants, nor does it show how much they have changed, so many differing evolutionary trees can be consistent with the same cladogram. A cladogram uses lines that branch off in different directions ending at a clade, a group of organisms with a last common ancestor. There are many shapes of cladograms but they all have lines that branch off from other lines. The lines can be traced back to where they branch off. These branching off points represent a hypothetical ancestor (not an actual entity) which can be inferred to exhibit the traits shared among the terminal taxa above it. This hypothetical ancestor might then provide clues about the order of evolution of various features, adaptation, and other evolutionary narratives about ance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Voay
''Voay'' is an extinct genus of crocodile from Madagascar that lived during the Late Pleistocene to Holocene, containing only one species, ''V. robustus''. Numerous subfossils have been found, including complete skulls, noted for their distinctive pair of horns on the posterior, as well as vertebrae and osteoderms from such places as Ambolisatra and Antsirabe. The genus is thought to have become extinct relatively recently. It has been suggested to have disappeared in the extinction event that wiped out much of the endemic megafauna on Madagascar, such as the elephant bird and Malagasy hippo, following the arrival of humans to Madagascar around 2000 years ago. Its name comes from the Malagasy word for crocodile. Description One unusual feature of ''V. robustus'' that distinguishes it from other crocodilians is the presence of prominent "horns" extending from the posterior portion of the skull. They are actually the posterolaterally extended corners of the squamosal bone. Other ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paleogenomics
Paleogenomics is a field of science based on the reconstruction and analysis of genomic information in extinct species. Improved methods for the extraction of ancient DNA (aDNA) from museum artifacts, ice cores, archeological or paleontological sites, and next-generation sequencing technologies have spurred this field. It is now possible to detect genetic drift, ancient population migration and interrelationships, the evolutionary history of extinct plant, animal and ''Homo'' species, and identification of phenotypic features across geographic regions. Scientists can also use paleogenomics to compare ancient ancestors against modern-day humans. The rising importance of paleogenomics is evident from the fact that the 2022 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to a Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo 955- who worked on paleogenomics. Background Initially, aDNA sequencing involved cloning small fragments into bacteria, which proceeded with low efficiency due to the oxidati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proceedings Of The Royal Society B
''Proceedings of the Royal Society'' is the main research journal of the Royal Society. The journal began in 1831 and was split into two series in 1905: * Series A: for papers in physical sciences and mathematics. * Series B: for papers in life sciences. Many landmark scientific discoveries are published in the Proceedings, making it one of the most historically significant science journals. The journal contains several articles written by the most celebrated names in science, such as Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Ernest Rutherford, Erwin Schrödinger, William Lawrence Bragg, Lord Kelvin, J.J. Thomson, James Clerk Maxwell, Dorothy Hodgkin and Stephen Hawking. In 2004, the Royal Society began ''The Journal of the Royal Society Interface'' for papers at the interface of physical sciences and life sciences. History The journal began in 1831 as a compilation of abstracts of papers in the ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'', the older Royal Society publication ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crocodilia
Crocodilia (or Crocodylia, both ) is an order of mostly large, predatory, semiaquatic reptiles, known as crocodilians. They first appeared 95 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period ( Cenomanian stage) and are the closest living relatives of birds, as the two groups are the only known survivors of the Archosauria. Members of the order's total group, the clade Pseudosuchia, appeared about 250 million years ago in the Early Triassic period, and diversified during the Mesozoic era. The order Crocodilia includes the true crocodiles (family Crocodylidae), the alligators and caimans (family Alligatoridae), and the gharial and false gharial (family Gavialidae). Although the term 'crocodiles' is sometimes used to refer to all of these, crocodilians is a less ambiguous vernacular term for members of this group. Large, solidly built, lizard-like reptiles, crocodilians have long flattened snouts, laterally compressed tails, and eyes, ears, and nostrils at the top ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fossil
A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved in amber, hair, petrified wood and DNA remnants. The totality of fossils is known as the ''fossil record''. Paleontology is the study of fossils: their age, method of formation, and evolutionary significance. Specimens are usually considered to be fossils if they are over 10,000 years old. The oldest fossils are around 3.48 billion years old to 4.1 billion years old. Early edition, published online before print. The observation in the 19th century that certain fossils were associated with certain rock strata led to the recognition of a geological timescale and the relative ages of different fossils. The development of radiometric dating techniques in the early 20th century allowed scientists to quantitatively measure the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
