Daniel Thomas

While only the black-footed, or jackass, penguin lives in Africa today, about 5 million years ago at least four penguin species lived in the continent.

By Tia Ghose
LiveScience

Penguin fossils from 10 million to 12 million years ago have been unearthed in South Africa, the oldest fossil evidence of these cuddly, tuxedoed birds in Africa.

The new discovery, detailed in Tuesday's issue of the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, could shed light on why the number of penguin species plummeted on Africa's coastline from four species 5 million years ago to just one today — Spheniscus demersus, or the jackass penguin, known for its donkeylike calls.

Daniel Thomas, a researcher at the National Museum of Natural History, and colleague Daniel Ksepka of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center were studying rock sediments near a steel plant in Cape Town, South Africa, when they uncovered an assortment of fossils, including 17 pieces that turned out to be backbones, breastbones, legs and wings from ancient penguins.

The bones suggested these ancient birds ranged from 1-to 3-feet tall (0.3 to 0.9 meters).  For comparison, Africa's living jackass penguin, also called the black-footed penguin, stands at about 2-feet tall (0.6 meters) and weighs between 5.5 and 8.8 pounds (2.5 and 4 kilograms). [Happy Feet: A Gallery of Pudgy Penguins]

The discovery pushes back the penguin fossil record in Africa by at least 5 million years.

Because the next oldest fossils from Africa date to 5 million years ago, it's tricky to determine exactly why most penguin species disappeared from Africa.

"It's like seeing two frames of a movie," Ksepka said in a statement. "We have a frame at 5 million years ago, and a frame at 10-12 million years ago, but there's missing footage in between."

One possibility is that changing sea levels eliminated most of the penguins' nesting sites.

About 5 million years ago, sea levels were 296 feet (90 m) higher than today, and the low-lying South Africa became a patchwork of islands. Those islands provided beaches for several penguin species to create nests and rear their young while sheltering them from predators.

Once the oceans fell, most of those beaches would become mainland.

Africa's remaining jackass penguins are also on the decline. Their numbers have plummeted by 80 percent, in part because humans are overfishing their staple foods, sardines and anchovies. African penguins are being bred in captivity; for instance, a successful breeding season at the New England Aquarium in 2010 ended with the birth of 11 new African penguin chicks.

In addition, Bristol Conservation and Science Foundation, along with South African and international partners, is working to establish breeding colonies of the African penguin closer to fish resources, to ensure successful chick-rearing, according to the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Dan Smythe, Canadian Museum of Nature

"Canadian Club," which could be one of the following clubbed ankylosaurs: Euoplocephalus (common), Scolosaurus and Dyoplosaurus (rare). The fossil is one of five featured in the Canadian Museum of Nature's "Dino Idol" contest.

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience

A spiky dinosaur took the top vote in a Canadian "Dino Idol" that asked visitors to one museum to select which fossil among five specimens that they wanted to see unwrapped from its protective packet.

"Canadian Club," an ankylosaur, took 36 percent of the votes cast. Its tally was 605 more votes than the second-place winner, which was part of a dinosaur mouth known as "Mystery Jaw."

Before voting, visitors to the Canadian Museum of Nature in the past month could view the fossils in their "jackets" of burlap, plaster and surrounding rock material.

"Our visitors were clearly drawn to Canadian Club, although each candidate was selected to provide something interesting to uncover," said Jordan Mallon, a palaeontologist at the museum, in Ottawa.

"The field notes from when Canadian Club was collected say the fossil includes the hips, tail and club of an ankylosaur. It's unusual to find these parts articulated or attached, so if that's the case it could provide more information about this dinosaur's anatomy." [Gallery: Dinosaurs Locked in Rock]

Each of the five specimens was collected between 1912 and 1924 by a famous Canadian fossil collector family, the Sternbergs. The Sternbergs retrieved Canadian Club in 1915 from an area now known as Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, about 112 miles (180 kilometers) east of Calgary.

The fossil weighs in at 661 pounds. Canadian Club's jacket will be opened April 8.

"The preparation may be challenging because the fossil is embedded in ironstone," the museum stated.

"Removing this hard substrate while preserving the more delicate fossil remains is likened to extracting an eggshell out of concrete."

Mallon said he is hoping to see scutes, or bony plates or scales that were on the skin of ankylosaurs. The scutes could have acted as a shield against predators to the plant-eating animal, he said.

The museum will share the unwrapping through several social media channels and will also post videos and blog updates as the work progresses.

Full results of the votes were as follows:

• Canadian Club (36 percent of votes): The hips, tail and bony club of an ankylosaur, possibly from the species Euoplocephalus tutus, collected in 1915.
• Mystery Jaw (25 percent): A mystery jaw from a tyrannosaurid, a carnivorous dinosaur, collected in 1914 that may belong to earlier cousins of Tyrannosaurus rex: Gorgosaurus libratus or Daspletosaurus torosus.
• Stumpy (18 percent): The skull of a horned dinosaur, possibly the rare Arrhinoceratops, which was collected in 1924.
• Regal Ed (11 percent): The skeleton of a duck-billed dinosaur called Edmontosaurus regalis.
• Headrosaur (10 percent): The skull of a hadrosaur, or a duck-billed dinosaur, found in 1914. The rest of its body likely washed away long ago.

Follow Stephanie Pappas on Twitter and Google+. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.

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Charles Musiba

The depth of ancient footprints, like the ones left in Laetoli, Tanzania 3.6 million years ago, could be misleading, new research suggests.

By Tia Ghose, LiveScience

Fossil footprints could provide a skewed view of how ancient animals — including early human ancestors similar to the famous Lucy fossil — walked, new research suggests.

In the past, paleontologists and anthropologists assumed the depth of the footprint correlated with the pressure used to create it. But the analysis, published March 19 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, reveals that the heel tends to create a deeper indentation even when applying the same amount of pressure.

"We shouldn't necessarily expect the shape of a footprint to directly reflect the way the animal that made it walked," said study co-author Karl Bates, a biomechanics researcher at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom.

As a result, some conclusions about how early human ancestors walked upright may need some rethinking, Bates said. [10 Greatest Mysteries of the First Humans]

Walking pressure
Fossil footprints have the potential to reveal insights into how ancient animals and people moved. For instance, Laetoli, Tanzania, bears the traces of 3.6-million-year-old footprints of the first bipedal walkers, Australopithecus afarensis, the same species as the female skeleton nicknamed Lucy.

But deciphering the ancient marks to recreate human ancestors' gait is tricky. Historically, scientists assumed the depth of the indentation directly correlated with the pressure placed at that spot. But testing that experimentally was difficult, as the force plates that measure foot-strike pressure are made of materials that don't deform and leave footprints.

Computer model
To get a more thorough look, Bates and his colleagues created a computer model that simulated the pressure of various sizes of feet as they depressed different types of soils with various strikes.

They then asked 10 people to walk along the beach in Brighton, on the south coast of Great Britain, and measured their footprints. The same people then walked on a force-measuring treadmill, and the researchers correlated the footprint depth with pressure during walking.

Both methods found similar trends: different parts of the foot create different size indentations even when striking the ground with the same amount of pressure.

"The heel is a more effective indenter than the forefoot and the toes," Bates told LiveScience.

The softer the walking surface, the more exaggerated this effect.

While the researchers focused on human gait, the new analysis should also apply to dinosaur prints and other extinct animal tracks, Bates said.

Ancient walkers
The study is impressive because it cleverly combined sophisticated computer models and experimental approaches, said Kristiaan D'Août, a biomechanics researcher at the University of Antwerp who was not involved in the study.

"They're two totally different techniques, but they both yielded overall rather similar results," D'Août told LiveScience.

The findings suggest there's a much more complicated relationship between foot pressure and footprint depth, which could force scientists to rethink their past assumptions about the gaits of early human ancestors, he said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter @tiaghose. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com

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Erik Trinkaus/WUSTL

Human skull fossils (inset) found at the Xujiayao site in China (background) show signs of a genetic disorder that hints at inbreeding.

By Tanya Lewis, LiveScience

Inbreeding may have been a common practice among early human ancestors, fossils show.

The evidence comes from fragments of an approximately 100,000-year-old human skull unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China. The skull's owner appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that probably arose through inbreeding, researchers report March 18 in the journal PLOS ONE.

The fossil, now dubbed Xujiayao 11, is just one of many examples of ancient human remains that display rare or unknown congenital abnormalities, according to the researchers. "These populations were probably relatively isolated, very small and, as a consequence, fairly inbred," study leader Erik Trinkhaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience.

The human skull fossil has a hole at its top, a disorder known as an "enlarged parietal foramen," which matches a modern human condition of the same name caused by a rare genetic mutation. The genetic abnormalities obstruct bone formation by preventing small holes in the prenatal braincase from closing, a process that normally occurs within the first five months of the fetus' development. Today, these mutations are rare, occurring in only about one of every 25,000 human births. [The 9 Most Bizarre Medical Conditions]

The skull appears to be from an individual who lived into middle age, indicating the abnormality was not lethal. The skull deformity can sometimes lead to cognitive deficits, but the age of the individual suggests any deficits probably would have been minor, Trinkhaus said.

The skulls of humans from the Pleistocene epoch (roughly 2.6 million to 12,000 years ago) show an unusually high occurrence of genetic abnormalities like this skull-hole deformity, the researchers found. Scientists have seen these abnormalities in fossils from the time of early Homo erectus to the end of the early Stone Age.

Such a high frequency of genetic abnormalities in the fossil record "reinforces the idea that during much of this period of human evolution, human populations were very small" and, consequently, likely inbred, Trinkhaus said.

Still, "it remains unclear, and probably un-testable, to what extent these populations were inbred," the researchers noted in their study.

Yet if such small, inbred populations did exist, it would invalidate many of the genetic inferences about when humans split off from the tree of life, Trinkhaus said, because these inferences assume large, stable populations.

Follow Tanya Lewis @tanyalewis314. Follow us @livescience, Facebook or Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com

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• Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans

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J.A. Peñas - SINC

An artist's impression of the egg-laying of the sauropod Ampelosaurus.

By LiveScience staff

Researchers in northeastern Spain say they've uncovered hundreds of dinosaur egg fossils, including four kinds that had never been found before in the region. The eggs likely were left behind by sauropods millions of years ago.

Eggs, eggshell fragments and dozens of clutches were nestled in the stratigraphic layers of the Tremp geological formation at the site of Coll de Nargó in the Spanish province of Lleida, which was a marshy region during the Late Cretaceous Period, the researchers said.

"Eggshells, eggs and nests were found in abundance and they all belong to dinosaurs, sauropods in particular," the study's leader, Albert García Sellés from the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Palaeontology Institute, told Spanish news agency SINC this week.

"Up until now, only one type of dinosaur egg had been documented in the region: Megaloolithus siruguei," Sellés added. His team found evidence of at least four other species: Cairanoolithus roussetensis, Megaloolithus aureliensis, Megaloolithus siruguei and Megaloolithus baghensis. Megaloolithus eggs are thought to be associated with sauropods, long-necked dinosaurs that were among some of the largest to roam the planet.

The Coll de Nargó area is considered one of the most important dinosaur nesting areas in Europe, the researchers said, adding that their study shows it was used by several dinosaurs from the Late Campanian age (around 71 million years ago) to the Late Maastrichtian age (around 67 million years ago).

"We had never found so many nests in the one area before. In addition, the presence of various oospecies (eggs species) at the same level suggests that different types of dinosaurs shared the same nesting area," Sellés said, adding that the dinosaur eggs could help scientists determine the date of future findings at the site.

"It has come to light that the different types of eggs are located at very specific time intervals," Sellés explained to SINC. "This allows us to create biochronological scales with a precise dating capacity. In short, thanks to the collection of oospecies found in Coll de Nargó we have been able to determine the age of the site at between 71 and 67 million years."

The findings are published in the March issue of the journal Cretaceous Research.

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Junchang Lu

A fossil of the newly found Yulong mini dinosaur, "Yulong looks like chicken with a tail," lead author Junchang Lu said.

By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery

A newly discovered dinosaur, Yulong mini, was appropriately named, as the remains of its chicken-sized offspring are now among the smallest dinosaurs ever found, according to a new study.

The tiny baby dinosaurs, described in the journal Naturwissenschaften, were oviraptorids, a.k.a. "egg thieves." These non-flying dinosaurs resembled modern birds, except adults of some species could grow to over 26 feet long.

"Yulong looks like chicken with a tail," lead author Junchang Lü told Discovery News. "Its behavior was similar to living birds too. Based on the primitive oviraptors such as Caudipteryx, Yulong should be feathered, although we could not find feathers due to the poor preservation condition."

PHOTOS: Oldest Dinosaur Nursery Found

Lü, of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, and his colleagues analyzed the dinosaur remains, which were unearthed at Henan Province in central China. In addition to Lü, the team included researchers from the Henan Geological Museum as well as Philip Currie from the University of Alberta.

While adult dinosaurs were found in the general region of the excavation, they were not directly with the babies, suggesting that members of this species did not require parental care when young.

It has been widely accepted that oviraptors were carnivores. One earlier specimen, for example, was found with the preserved remains of a lizard in its stomach. The new study, however, challenges that theory.

In terms of the new oviraptor fossils, "based on their hind limb proportions, the pattern is more commonly seen in herbivores than in carnivores, thus indicating that they were herbivores," Lü said.

PHOTOS: Dinosaur Feathers Found in Amber 

He did, however, add that the jaw structure of this dinosaur could have handled a few meaty edibles.

"It provided strong bite force when (the dinosaur) ate hard foods such as nuts, mollusks and even eggs," he explained.

Currie, though, described Yulong mini as having a "sedentary lifestyle that did not involve the pursuit of similar-sized prey."

The dinosaur might then have rather passively poked around for food, similar to how some birds today forage.

Yulong mini itself was good eats.

Just as many humans today love chicken, it seems that other dinosaurs enjoyed chowing down on Yulong. Remains of several large carnivorous dinosaurs, including T. rex, were found in the area and likely preyed on the more sedentary dinosaurs, the researchers believe.

PHOTOS: Tiny Dinosaurs: Vegetarian, But Fierce

While Yulong mini and other oviraptorid dinosaurs resembled chickens and other modern birds and appear to have behaved somewhat like them, they were definitely non-avian dinosaurs and not birds.

"They could not have been the ancestors to modern birds," Lü explained. "They (exemplify) convergent evolution and went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous."

That was around 65 million years ago, when the world's non-avian dinosaurs all went extinct.

O. Sanisidro

Though the plant-eating dinosaur Ampelosaurus was among the largest to walk the Earth, it was equipped with a puny brain.

By Charles Choi, contributor, LiveScience

An advanced member of the largest group of dinosaurs ever to walk the Earth still had a relatively puny brain, researchers say.

The scientists analyzed the skull of 70-million-year-old fossils of the giant dinosaur Ampelosaurus, discovered in 2007 in Cuenca, Spain, in the course of the construction of a high-speed rail track connecting Madrid with Valencia. The reptile was a sauropod, long-necked, long-tailed herbivores that were the largest creatures ever to stride the Earth. More specifically, Ampelosaurus was a kind of sauropod known as a titanosaur, many if not all of which had armorlike scales covering their bodies.

Sauropod skulls are typically fragile, and few have survived intact enough for scientists to learn much about their brains. By scanning the interior of the skull via CT imaging, the researchers developed a 3-D reconstruction of Ampelosaurus' brain, which was not much bigger than a tennis ball.

"This saurian may have reached 15 meters (49 feet) in length; nonetheless its brain was not in excess of 8 centimeters (3 inches)," study researcher Fabien Knoll, a paleontologist at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences, said in a statement. [ Gallery: Stunning Illustrations of Dinosaurs ]

The first sauropods appeared about 160 million years earlier than this fossil.

"We don't see much expansion of brain size in this group of animals as they go through time, unlike a lot of mammalian and bird groups, where you see increases in brain size over time," researcher Lawrence Witmer, an anatomist and paleontologist at Ohio University, told LiveScience. "They apparently hit on something and stuck with it — expansion of brain size over time wasn't a major focus of theirs."

For years, scientists have wondered how the largest land animals ever lived with such tiny brains. "Maybe we should flip that question on their end — maybe we shouldn't ask how they could function with tiny brains, but what are many modern animals doing with such ridiculously large brains. Cows may be triple-Einsteins compared to most dinosaurs, but why?" Witmer said.

heir computer model also revealed the ampelosaur had a small inner ear.

"Part of the inner ear is associated with hearing, so the fact it had a small inner ear means it probably wasn't all that good at hearing airborne sounds," Witmer said. "It probably used a kind of hearing we don't think much about, which depends on sounds transmitted through the ground."

The inner ear is also responsible for balance and equilibrium, Witmer said.

"Given what we know about its inner ear, Ampelosaurus probably didn't put a real premium on rapid, quick jerky eye or head movements, which makes sense — these are relatively large, slow-moving, plant-eating animals," he said.

Knoll and his colleagues had previously developed 3-D reconstructions of another sauropod, Spinophorosaurus nigeriensis. In contrast to Ampelosaurus, Spinophorosaurus had a fairly developed inner ear.

"It is quite enigmatic that sauropods show such a diverse inner ear morphology whereas they have a very homogenous body shape," Knoll said. "More investigation is definitely required."

Currently scientists are debating whether sauropods held their heads near the ground, grazing on low vegetation, or high up like giraffes to browse on high leaves. "It could be that learning more about the inner ear could tell us what sauropod neck posture was like," Witmer said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 23 in the journal PLOS ONE.

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Stephanie Abramowicz, NHM Dinosaur Institute

Researchers have determined the gender of a specimen of an ancient beaked bird Confuciusornis sanctus (reconstruction shown here) to be female, finding this species has drab females and flashy males like today's birds.

By Charles Choi
LiveScience

An ancient, beaked bird that lived in what is today northeastern China was ovulating when she, yes "she," perished some 125 million years ago, suggests new research that can reveal the gender of bird fossils.

Scientists investigated the ancient, beaked bird Confuciusornis sanctus. Hundreds of fossils of the extinct, crow-sized species are found in lake deposits in northeastern China. The area back then was "a seasonal forest that surrounded small lakes, a very rich ecosystem with a great variety of animals and plants," said researcher Luis Chiappe, paleontologist and director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's Dinosaur Institute.

Some fossils of this ancient bird were discovered with pairs of long, almost body-length ornamental tail feathers, while others were not. Scientists had suggested these differences were sexual in nature; in modern birds, males, such as peacocks, are often flamboyantly showy to court the opposite sex, while females, such as peahens, are typically rather drab, presumably to avoid attracting the attention of predators to themselves or their young.

Scientists had little evidence to prove whether the more flashy Confuciusornis sanctus fossils were male or not, however. But now researchers have found details in these skeletons that apparently enable clear gender identification, suggesting the showier fossils were indeed male. [ Avian Ancestors: Dinosaurs That Learned to Fly ]

Specifically, the researchers discovered medullary bone, spongy tissue unique to reproductively active female birds, in a specimen unearthed by local farmers. Medullary bone helps female birds manufacture eggshells.

"I think that it is so exciting to be able to say with certainty that this 125-million-year-old fossil bird was a reproductively active female," researcher Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan, a paleobiologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, told LiveScience.

"People might wonder why this has never been found before," Chinsamy-Turan added. "The reason is that for medullary bone to be observed, the female bird has to be in a particular physiological state — that is, ovulating, or just having laid eggs."

This female fossil did not possess ornamental feathers, which supports the idea that ancient female birds were as drab as their modern counterparts.

Intriguingly, researchers found medullary bone in some fossils even before the skeletons of those birds were full-grown. This suggests that this and other early birds matured sexually well before their skeletons matured.

"The most important conclusion is that early birds had reproductive patterns very different from their living counterparts and more akin to large dinosaurs," Chiappe told LiveScience.

The research could help scientists determine the sex of birds that lived millions of years ago, as well as shed light on ancient sexual maturity patterns. Future research should analyze other early bird species, Chiappe said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.

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Peter Brown

A skull from the Flores site, left, sits alongside a modern human skull.

By Jennifer Viegas
Discovery

New bones attributed to Homo floresiensis — aka the "Hobbit human" — along with other recent findings, are helping to reveal what members of this species looked like, how they behaved and their origins.

The latest findings, described in a Journal of Human Evolution paper, are wrist bones unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores. Since they are nearly identical to other such bones for the Hobbit found at the site, they refute claims that H. floresiensis never existed.

"The tiny people from Flores were not simply diseased modern humans," Caley Orr, lead author of the paper, told Discovery News.

"The new species of human stood approximately 3' 6" tall, giving it its nickname 'The Hobbit,'" continued Orr, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at Midwestern University.

He said that they were "similar to modern humans in many respects." For example, he explained that they walked on two legs, had small canine teeth, and lived what appears to have been an iconic "cave man'" lifestyle.

"Stone tools and evidence of fire use were found in the cave, along with the remains of butchered animals, such as Stegodon (an extinct elephant relative), indicating that meat was a part of diet," Orr said.

He and his colleagues, however, also point out the differences between the Hobbit individuals and modern humans.

The Hobbits had arms that were longer than their legs, giving them a slightly more ape-like structure. Their skulls had no bony chins, so their faces had more of an oval shape. Their forehead was sloping. The inferred brain size was tiny, putting them in the IQ range of chimpanzees.

"Remarkably, the feet were also long relative to the legs, as fantasy fans might expect of a Hobbit," he added.

The Hobbit's wrist looked like that of early human relatives, such as Australopithecus, but the key ancestral candidate now is Homo erectus, "Upright Man."

It is possible that a population of H. erectus became stranded on the Indonesian island and dwarfed there over time. Orr said that "sometimes happens to larger animals that adapt to small island environments."

A problem, however, is that H. erectus is somewhat more modern looking than the Hobbit, so researchers are still seeking more clues.

Another question concerns whether or not the Hobbits ever mated with modern humans. There is evidence that happened to Neanderthals, which have left traces of their genome in modern human DNA. So far, however, conditions have not been right to extract DNA from H. floresiensis bones.

Nonetheless, the Hobbit — which went extinct relatively recently during the Pleistocene — is now better known due to the new discoveries.

"These fossils provide further, clear evidence that H. floresiensis is in no way a pathological modern human, or that its primitive morphology is related simply to its small body size," said Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "Instead, it is clearly its own, unique and very intriguing species."

Kivell added, "What is particularly interesting is that H. floresiensis is associated with such a long, well-documented history of stone tools. (Its primitive hand and wrist were) still apparently capable of making and using stone tools, suggesting that H. floresiensis solved the morphological and manipulative demands of tool-making and tool-use in a different way than Neanderthals and ourselves."

Orr and his team continue to study the Hobbit humans, with at least one other paper about the interesting species in the works.