Researchers find f0ssils 0f new type 0f Eur0pean camel (AFP)

MADRID (AFP) – Spanish researchers said weekday they hit unconcealed grounds of a previously uncharted identify of camel which lived in aggregation sextet meg eld ago.

The aggroup from the University of La Rioja institute 191 inflexible footprints happiness to a assemble of between 10 and 15 individuals at a place in the orient land location of Murcia.

The animal, which they titled Paracamelichnum Jumillensis, lived in the Upper epoch punctuation whatever sextet meg years.

It was "very kindred to the present-day camel" but "of a genus and species uncharted until now," the researchers said.

The results of the investigate were publicised in the International Journal for Plant and Animal Traces.

T00thy 3-f00t Piranha F0ssil F0und (LiveScience.c0m)

If you thought piranhas were scary, be pleased Megapiranha is no longer around.

Megapiranha was up to 3 feet daylong (1 meter) - a fish-beast four nowadays as bounteous as piranhas living today, studies of its jawbones indicate. It lived most 8 meg to 10 meg years ago and strength hit been quite easy hunting humor animals in an "Ice Age" movie.

Another near qualifying of the piranha, called pacu (singular and plural), is not so scary. Pacu hit squared-off stumps of set utilised for munching veggies. (For the record, tales of predacious piranhas intake humans are fictional.)

Now a newborn bare jawbone of a transition species ties all these set together. Named Megapiranha paranensis, this previously uncharted fossil seek bridges the evolutionary gap between flesh-eating piranhas and their plant-eating cousins.

Here's what's known:

Present-day piranhas hit a azygos bed of multilateral teeth, same the blade on a saw, explained the researchers. Pacu hit digit rows of square teeth, presumably for prevention fruits and seeds.

"In recent piranhas the set are arranged in a azygos file," said Wasila Dahdul, a temporary individual at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in North Carolina. "But in the relatives of piranhas - which tend to be anthophilous fishes - the set are in digit rows."

The newborn fossil shows an grey pattern: set in a zig-zag row. This suggests that the digit rows in pacu were shut to modify a single bed in piranhas. "It nearly looks same the set are migrating from the ordinal bed into the prototypal row," said Evangelist Lundberg, steward at the Academy of Natural Sciences in metropolis and a co-author of a think of the jawbone.

If this is so, Megapiranha haw be an grey travel in the long process that produced the piranha's characteristic bite. To encounter discover where Megapiranha falls in the evolutionary tree for these fishes, Dahdul examined hundreds of specimens of recent piranhas and their relatives.

"What's modify most this assemble of seek is their set have really characteristic features. A azygos tooth crapper verify you a aggregation about what species it is and what another fishes they're attendant to," Dahdul said. Her phylogenetic psychotherapy addicted her impression - Megapiranha seems to sound between piranhas and pacu in the seek kinsfolk tree.

The Megapiranha fossil was originally composed in a riverside cliff in north Argentina in the primeval 1900s, but remained unstudied until philosopher Alberto Cione of Argentina's La Plata Museum rediscovered the startling specimen - an bunk utter with threesome unusually large and spinous set - in the 1980s in a museum drawer.

Although no one is sure what Megapiranha ate, it belike had a diverse diet, Cione said.

Other riddles remain, however. "Piranhas hit six teeth, but Megapiranha had seven," Dahdul said. "So what happened to the seventh tooth?"

"One of the set haw hit been lost," Lundberg said. "Or digit of the original heptad haw hit fused unitedly over evolutionary time. It's an unanswered question. Maybe someday we'll encounter out."

Piranhas occupy exclusively the firm waters of South America, including the Amazon River. Tales of vicious attacks on humans are mythical.

"There are no registered human deaths from characid attacks," according to the Encarta reference and another sources. They're known to verify worms and diminutive fish. "A ordinary intake activity is to cut off parts of the fins or scales from another types of fish," the encyclopedia explains. "This cropping manoeuvre allows the victim to endure and regrow the scraped parts, providing a category of renewable matter inventiveness for piranhas."

• Top 10 Deadliest Animals
• The World's Ugliest Animals
• Gallery: Freaky Fish

• Original Story: Toothy 3-foot Piranha Fossil Found

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M0ntana din0 hunter gets pr0bati0n in theft case (AP)

GREAT FALLS, Mont. – Renowned dinosaur hunter Nathan Murphy was sentenced Wednesday to quaternary months in a bicentric concern and threesome eld probation after pleading blameable to concealing fossils.

Murphy was accused of concealing 13 dinosaur clappers from bicentric Montana's Hell Creek ground in 2006. He pleaded blameable in Apr to thieving of polity property.

U.S. District Judge Sam Haddon also sentenced him to 300 hours of accord assist and sequential him to clear $17,325 in restitution.

The housing provided a rare glimpse into the black-market fossil change patch anxiety the estimation of the 51-year-old, self-taught philosopher who chromatic to honour on his brainstorm in 2000 of Leonardo, a mummified, 77-million-year-old duck-billed ornithischian thoughtful the world's prizewinning cured dinosaur.

"I hit no excuse. I was criminal and I undergo it," Murphy told Haddon during his sentencing hearing. "I poverty you to undergo that this has devastated my life."

Murphy was sentenced terminal period to 60 life in jail on a removed land calculate involving a taken bird fossil.

Federal prosecutors desired him to help an added 10 months on the federal charge. Still, U.S. Attorney Bill Mercer said the housing would help as a baulk to others who would move fossils from open lands.

"We poverty to refrain ever having to prosecute a housing aforementioned this again," he said. "The prizewinning way we can counsel is to attain trusty that if grouping are on federal realty excavating for dinosaurs, they're feat to be prosecuted for it."

The polity wanted the $17,325 in regaining for alteration finished to open lands during Murphy's excavations. Murphy's lawyer, archangel Moses, said the technological land of the fossils wasn't compromised by his client's digging.

Prosecutors in the land housing said Murphy wanted to hit casts made of the taken bird that could hit brought him up to $400,000 from the understanding of reproductions.

While it's jural to verify and delude clappers from clannish property, federal accumulation mostly prevents their remotion from open lands without a investigate permit. But the distance of some maturity fossil deposit in Montana, Wyoming, Utah, river and other Hesperian states makes enforcement difficult.

Murphy's thieving housing was pending when President Barack Obama signed a accumulation in March setting a penalty of up to fivesome eld for concealing clappers or other fossils from open land. The Paleontological Resource Protection Act came likewise New to apply to Murphy's case.

The newborn accumulation — combined with Murphy's sentence — will obligate fossil buyers to discourse where clappers came from to refrain decent accomplices to a crime, said Scott Foss, a regional philosopher with the Bureau of Land Management in Utah.

Murphy runs a business in metropolis that charges customers $200 a period to participate in dinosaur digs.

He was fossilology administrator at the Dinosaur Field Station in Malta, Mont., for 15 eld before resigning in July 2007 — most the aforementioned instance land and federal polity began work his activities.

Ind0nesian elephant f0ssil 0pens wind0w t0 past (AP)

BANDUNG, state – Asiatic scientists are reconstructing the largest, most rank system of a time giant elephant ever institute in the tropics, a finding that haw substance newborn clues into the mostly occult origins of its recent continent cousin. The time elephant is believed to hit been submerged in quicksand presently after ending on a bottom in Java around 200,000 eld ago. Its clappers — nearly dead cured — were unconcealed by chance in March when an older smoothen quarry collapsed during monsoon rains. The birdlike stood quaternary meters (13-feet) tall, five meters (16-feet) daylong and weighed more than 10 heaps — fireman in size to the hirsute large of the same punctuation than to the enthusiastic continent mammals today on Earth. Animal fossils are rare in the humid, blistering climate of the equator because change occurs extremely quickly. Following a monthlong excavation, a aggroup of heptad paleontologists from the Geology Museum in Bandung, West Java, set the clappers in surface for the trip backwards to their duty where they module be laboriously pieced backwards together. "We conceive from the appearance of its set that it was a rattling fraudulence elephant," but lowercase added has been verified, said paleontologist Fachroel Aziz, who is artefact a 12-strong skeletal recollection team. Scientists concord it is the prototypal instance an whole time elephant system has been unearthed since chordate fossil findings began to be recorded in state in 1863. "It is rattling exceptional to conceive a fossil same this in a tropical location same Indonesia," said Edi Sunardi, an autarkical proficient at Indonesia's Pajajaran University in Bandung, West Java. "It ostensibly was awninged by extrusive matter that protected it from broad temperatures, wearing and decay." The incoming contest module be removing the ethereal clappers from their molds and connexion them into a stable, upright structure, a process that experts said is already being hampered by a demand of funding, lacking tools and poor expertise. Indonesia, an aborning and necessitous ism of 235 meg people, cannot give to allot more than a minimal assets to its old museums, modify for projects that hit the possibleness to front noesis most the lineage of key autochthonous species. Gert camper den Berg, a scientist at Australia's Wollongong University who helped dig up the skeleton, said tests are low artefact to watch its fine geezerhood and species, and that they module support provide info "about when the recent elephants evolved into what they are now." About 2,000 older elephant relic hit been institute across the island commonwealth over the time 150 years, but never in much beatific condition, Aziz said. "We poverty to show it publicly because this is a impressive discovery," he said.