April 19, 2024, 04:44:11 pm
Welcome,
Guest
. Please
login
or
register
.
1 Hour
1 Day
Forever
Login with username, password and session length
News
: Hunt for Lost City of Atlantis
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3227295.stm
Home
Help
Arcade
Gallery
Links
Staff List
Calendar
Login
Register
Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
Atlantis Online
>
Forum
>
Atlantis
>
Geology & Atlantis
>
Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
Pages: [
1
]
Go Down
« previous
next »
Print
Author
Topic: Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline (Read 182 times)
0 Members and 118 Guests are viewing this topic.
Ascendent Angel
Hero Member
Posts: 131
Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
«
on:
June 12, 2009, 01:14:06 am »
Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
ScienceDaily (June 10, 2009) — In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, Calif., shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground.
See also:
Plants & Animals
* Fish
* Marine Biology
Earth & Climate
* Oceanography
* Global Warming
Fossils & Ruins
* Fossils
* Dinosaurs
Reference
* Trace fossil
* Great White Shark
* Evolution of cetaceans
* Sediment
Yet, new research by a team of paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the University of Utah paints a less catastrophic picture. Instead of a sudden die-off, the researchers say that the bone bed is a 700,000-year record of normal life and death, kept free of sediment by unusual climatic conditions between 15 million and 16 million years ago.
The team's interpretation of the fossils and the geology to establish the origins of the bone bed, the richest and most extensive marine deposit of bones in the world, are presented in the June 2009 issue of the journal Geology.
The mix of shark bones and teeth, turtle shells three times the size of today's leatherbacks, and ancient whale, seal, dolphin and fish skeletons, comprise a unique six-to-20-inch-thick layer of fossil bones, 10 miles of it exposed, that covers nearly 50 square miles just outside and northeast of Bakersfield.
Since the bed's discovery in the 1850s, paleontologists have battled over an obvious question: How did the bones get there? Was this a killing ground for megalodon, a 40-foot version of today's great white shark? Was it a long-term breeding area for seals and other marine mammals, like Mexico's Scammon's lagoon is for the California gray whale? Did a widespread catastrophe, like a red tide or volcanic eruption, lead to a massive die-off?
Report Spam
Logged
Ascendent Angel
Hero Member
Posts: 131
Re: Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
«
Reply #1
on:
June 12, 2009, 01:14:30 am »
The new and extensive study of the fossils and the geology of Sharktooth Hill tells a less dramatic story, but an important one, for understanding the origin of rich fossil accumulations, said Nicholas Pyenson, a former UC Berkeley graduate student who is now a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia.
"If you look at the geology of this fossil bed, it's not intuitive how it formed," Pyenson said. "We really put together all lines of evidence, with the fossil evidence being a big part of it, to obtain a snapshot of that period of time."
Pyenson and his colleagues, totaling five UC Berkeley Ph.D.s and UC Berkeley integrative biology professor Jere Lipps, hope that the study will draw renewed attention to the bone bed, which Lipps said needs protection even though a small portion of it was added to the National Natural Landmark registry in 1976.
"This deposit, if properly developed, would look just like Dinosaur National Monument," said Lipps, referring to a popular park in Colorado and Utah. "(Sharktooth Hill) is actually much more extensive, and the top of the bone bed has complete, articulated skeletons of seals and other marine mammals."
One 12-foot-long fossil seal skeleton that Lipps helped excavate during the 50 years he has visited the bone bed was mounted and displayed for decades at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), which houses thousands of fossils excavated from the Sharktooth Hill deposits during expeditions in the 1960s and 1980s. Other collections are in the California Academy of Sciences, San Diego Natural History Museum, Buena Vista Museum of Natural History in Bakersfield, and UC Berkeley's Museum of Paleontology (UCMP), where students over the years have made studies of the bone bed's extinct sea turtles, sharks, marine mammals and seabirds. Lipps is a faculty curator in the UCMP.
Report Spam
Logged
Ascendent Angel
Hero Member
Posts: 131
Re: Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
«
Reply #2
on:
June 12, 2009, 01:14:54 am »
The paper's other coauthors - all of whom obtained their Ph.D.s from UC Berkeley - are Randall B. Irmis, now an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Utah, and Lawrence G. Barnes, Edward D. Mitchell Jr. and Samuel A. McLeod of NHM's Department of Vertebrate Paleontology.
When the bone bed formed between 15,900,000 and 15,200,000 years ago, the climate was warming, sea level was at a peak, California's Central Valley was an inland sea dubbed the Temblor Sea and the emerging Sierra Nevada was shoreline. By closely studying the geology of the Sharktooth Hill area, the paleontologists determined that it was part of an underwater shelf in a large embayment, directly opposite a wide opening to the sea.
Pyenson and Irmis examined some 3,000 fossilized bone and teeth specimens in the collections of many museums, including the NHM and UCMP, and they and Lipps also cut out a meter-square section of the bone bed, complete with the rock layers above and below, and transported it to UC Berkeley for study.
Below the bone bed, they found several feet of mudstone interlaced with shrimp burrows, typical of ocean floor sediment several hundred to several thousand feet below the surface. The bone bed itself averaged 200 bones per square meter, most of them larger bones, with almost no sediment. Most were disarticulated, as if the animal carcasses had decayed and their bones had been scattered by currents.
"The bones look a bit rotten," Lipps said, "as if they lay on the seafloor for a long time and were abraded by water with sand in it." Many bones had manganese nodules and growths, which form on bones that sit for long periods in sea water before being covered by sediment.
Report Spam
Logged
Ascendent Angel
Hero Member
Posts: 131
Re: Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
«
Reply #3
on:
June 12, 2009, 01:15:11 am »
Toward the top of the bone bed, some articulated skeletons of seals and whales were found, while in the layer above the bone bed, most skeletons were articulated and encased in sediment.
The team's conclusion is that the climatic conditions were such that currents carried sediment around the bone beds for 100,000 to 700,000 years, during which time bones remained exposed on the ocean floor and accumulated in a big and shifting pile.
Given the rarity of bones marked by shark bites, plus the occurrence of terrestrial animals such as tapirs and horses that must have washed out to sea, predation by sharks like Carcharocles megalodon seems unlikely to have been the major source of the bone bed, the authors wrote. Because of few young or juvenile specimens, the team also discounted the hypothesis that this was a breeding ground for early seals such as Allodesmus. The absence of volcanic ash makes a volcanic catastrophe unlikely, while the presence of land mammal fossils makes red tide an unlikely cause.
"These animals were dying over the whole area, but no sediment deposition was going on, possibly related to rising sea levels that snuffed out silt and sand deposition or restricted it to the very near-shore environment," Pyenson said. "Once sea level started going down, then more sediment began to erode from near shore."
Pyenson noted that, while bone beds around the world occur in diverse land and marine environments, the team's analysis of the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed could have implications for other fossil-rich marine deposits.
The work was funded by UCMP and UC Berkeley's Department of Integrative Biology, as well as by grants from the Geological Society of America and the American Museum of Natural History, and graduate fellowships from the National Science Foundation.
Adapted from materials provided by University of California - Berkeley.
Report Spam
Logged
Ascendent Angel
Hero Member
Posts: 131
Re: Fossil Bone Bed Helps Reconstruct Life Along California's Ancient Coastline
«
Reply #4
on:
June 12, 2009, 01:15:42 am »
Teeth such as this from the extinct 40-foot-long shark Carcharocles megalodon are common in the Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed because, like modern sharks, these extinct sharks also shed teeth throughout their lives. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Berkeley)
Report Spam
Logged
Pages: [
1
]
Go Up
Print
« previous
next »
Jump to:
Please select a destination:
-----------------------------
Atlantis Online - Messages
-----------------------------
=> Messages
=> Administrative Messages
=> Commemorating Dates in History
=> Alerts & Warnings
=> Upcoming Events, Releases & Ads
=> Television: Shows & Events
-----------------------------
the Coffee Shop
-----------------------------
=> the Coffee Shop
=> Atlantis: Polls & News
=> Poltical Alerts
=> Causes & Activism
-----------------------------
Videos, Documentaries & Online Movies
-----------------------------
=> Ancient History & Lost Civilizations
=> Ghosts, UFOs & the Esoteric
=> Music, Entertainment & the Arts
=> Conspiracies & Suppressed Knowledge
=> Documentary & Videos
-----------------------------
Ages of the Earth
-----------------------------
=> The Early Earth, Geology & Fossils
=> Dinosaurs
=> Catastrophes & Mass Extinctions
=> Ice Age
=> Humanity's Origins & Civilization's First Steps
-----------------------------
Mythology & Heroic Sagas of Culture & Myth
-----------------------------
=> Mythology
=> Greek Mythology
=> Arthurian Myth
=> Quest for King Arthur
-----------------------------
Atlantis
-----------------------------
=> Atlantis & the Atlantic Ocean
=> Atlantis: Theories & Speculation
=> Plato's Atlantis
=> the Scientific Atlantis
=> Geology & Atlantis
=> Atlantis & the New Age
=> Atlantis in the Media
-----------------------------
Satellite Discoveries & Alternate Archaeology
-----------------------------
=> Alternate Archaeology
=> Satellite Discoveries & Aerial Archaeology
=> the Bock Saga
-----------------------------
Maps, Explorers & Adventurers
-----------------------------
=> the Oceans
=> Islands
=> the Bahamas, Bermuda, Cuba & the West Indies
=> Explorers & Adventurers
=> Maps, Cartographers & Cartography
-----------------------------
Egypt & the Pyramids
-----------------------------
=> Gods of Egypt
=> Egypt & the Pyramids
=> the Giza Complex
=> the Dynasties of Egypt
=> Egypt: Latest Discoveries
-----------------------------
the Guanches, Basques, Berbers & Sea People
-----------------------------
=> Guanches, Basques & Berbers
=> Pirates, Phantom Islands & Stories of the Sea
=> the Sea People
-----------------------------
the Ancient World
-----------------------------
=> Neolithic Europe
=> Stonehenge & the Druids
=> the Library of Alexandria, Ancient Historians & Philosophers
=> Ancient Warfare
=> the Spartans
-----------------------------
the Dawn of Civilization
-----------------------------
=> Africa, the Cradle of Life
=> China & the Asian Empires
=> Eastern Mysticism, India, & the Ancient Far East
=> Zoroastrianism, Arabia & the Near East
=> the Sumerians
=> Ancient Asia Minor
=> Hawaii, Australia, Alaska & the Pacific Rim
-----------------------------
Ancient Mediterranean Cultures
-----------------------------
=> Minoan Crete
=> Phoenicians & Carthage
=> Mediterranean Islands
=> Israelities & the Kabbalah
=> Etruscans
=> Ancient Greece
=> Rome: Empire & Republic
-----------------------------
Ancient European Cultures
-----------------------------
=> The Picts & Celts
=> Ireland: History & Myths
=> Balkan History
=> Italy & Magna Graecia
=> the Vikings & Scandinavia
=> Germanic History
-----------------------------
Timelines of Ancient Europe
-----------------------------
=> History of Britain
=> Scotland: in History & Lore
=> Continental Europe: Past & Present
=> the Dark Ages
=> the Medieval World
=> The Renaissance
-----------------------------
the Ancient Americas
-----------------------------
=> the Ancient Americas
=> Peru: Mysteries & Prehistory
=> Mesoamerican & South American Cultures
===> Aztec
===> Incan
===> Olmec
===> Toltec & Teotihuacan
=> Mayan
=> Native American
=> Canada: Past & Present
-----------------------------
The Crusades, Templars & the Holy Grail
-----------------------------
=> the Crusades
=> the Knights Templar
=> The Holy Grail & Christian artifacts
=> The Sacred Feminine, the Cathars & Gnosticism
=> the Da Vinci Code
-----------------------------
Ancient Mysteries
-----------------------------
=> Philosophy
=> Ancient Mysteries
=> Lemuria, Mu & other sunken civilizations
=> Easter Island
=> Oak Island
-----------------------------
Archaeology & Anthropology
-----------------------------
=> Museums & Universities
=> Archaeology
=> Ancient Languages
=> Archaeological News
=> Underwater Archaeology
-----------------------------
Ancient Knowledge, Mysticism & Sacred Beliefs
-----------------------------
=> Ley Lines, Ancient Astronomy & Archeoastronomy
=> Prophecy, 2012, End Times & the End of the World
=> Sacred Symbols
=> The Ancient Arts: Astrology, Alchemy, the Tarot, Arcane Recondite Practices & the I Ching
-----------------------------
Search for the Sacred
-----------------------------
=> Angels & Angelology
=> Goddess Worship
=> Search for the Sacred
=> World Religions
=> the Urantia Book
=> Wicca, Witchcraft, Paganism & Ritual Magic
-----------------------------
Health & Healing
-----------------------------
=> Health, Healing & Medical News
=> Human Biology
=> Love & Relationships
=> Women's Studies
-----------------------------
Science & Technology
-----------------------------
=> Science, Physics & Technology
=> History of Science
=> Evolution vs. Intelligent Design
=> Human Genetics
-----------------------------
Earth Changes
-----------------------------
=> Earth Changes
=> Global Warming
=> Botany & Plant Life
===> Plants of the Americas that Changed the World
=> Antarctica & the Arctic
-----------------------------
Space
-----------------------------
=> NASA
=> Mars, the Red Planet
=> Life on Other Worlds
=> the Universe
=> Images from Space
-----------------------------
UFOs, Aliens & Future Science
-----------------------------
=> UFO's
=> Aliens & Alien Abduction
=> UFO Evidence & in the Media
=> Alternate History & Multiverses
=> Future Science
=> Time Travel
-----------------------------
the Occult
-----------------------------
=> Ghosts & Apparitions
=> Communicating with the Dead
=> Paranormal Events, Reincarnation & Near Death Experiences
=> the Enchanted World
=> the Supernatural
=> the Occult
-----------------------------
the Unexplained
-----------------------------
=> Cryptozoology
=> Bigfoot Sightings
=> the Unexplained
=> the Hollow Earth, Crop Circles, Strange Structures & Devices
=> Vanishings & Unsolved Murders
-----------------------------
Science Fiction & Fantasy
-----------------------------
=> Lord of the Rings
=> Science Fiction
=> King Kong, Gigantopithecus & the Mountain Gorilla
=> Godzilla, King of Monsters
=> Comic Books
===> Comic Book Creators
===> Videogames & Toys
-----------------------------
Halloween & Seasonal
-----------------------------
=> Halloween
=> Seasonal
=> Monsters of Myth, Movies & Folklore
=> Ghost Stories
=> the Zombie Apocalypse
-----------------------------
Genres of Film & Literature
-----------------------------
=> Universal Horror
=> H. P. Lovecraft
=> Horror
=> Dark Shadows
=> Twin Peaks
=> Online Horror Movies Sci-Fi & TV Series
-----------------------------
Arts & Literature
-----------------------------
=> Online Books & Research Papers
=> Classical Literature & Book Reviews
=> Art History
=> Architecture
=> Sculpture & Statuary
=> the Great Masters
=> Music
-----------------------------
Media & Film
-----------------------------
=> Cinema
=> the History of Film
=> Marilyn Monroe
=> Actresses & Models
=> Entertainment News
-----------------------------
Modern Historical Mysteries
-----------------------------
=> American History
===> Presidents of the United States
=> the World Wars
===> the Great Depression
=> the Holocaust
=> the Middle East: Past & Present
=> Modern History
===> the Industrial Age
===> Civil Rights
=> Great Cities of the World
=> the Kennedys: Their History & Assasinations
=> New York City: Then & Now
-----------------------------
September 11th, 2001
-----------------------------
=> September 11th: Conspiracies, Cover-ups & Remembrance
=> The World Trade Center Remembered
===> Life of the Twin Towers
=> Modern Warfare
=> Environmental Disasters & Mass Tragedies
-----------------------------
Suppressed Knowledge
-----------------------------
=> New World Order
=> Conspiracies
=> Suppressed Knowledge
=> Media Matters
-----------------------------
Politics
-----------------------------
=> the Barack Obama Administration
=> Conservatives, Trump, & Republican Politics
=> Joe Biden, Democratic Politics & News
=> Tea Party, Constitution, Libertarian Parties & Ron Paul
=> Politics & News
-----------------------------
Current Events
-----------------------------
=> Current Events & Odd Stories
=> The World Today
=> Financial News & the Economy
===> The History of Labor
=> Breaking News
-----------------------------
General Category
-----------------------------
=> Opinions & Editorials
=> Cartoons, Humor & Comic Strips
=> Ecology, Pets & the Animal Kingdom
=> General & Miscellaneous
=> Sports
=> Computers & the Internet
-----------------------------
Art, Graphics & Creative Writing
-----------------------------
=> Fantasy Art & Graphics
=> Creative Writing
===> Horror Fiction
=> Poetry
=> Photography & Models
=> Earth Images
-----------------------------
Past Events
-----------------------------
=> Case for Bush Impeachment/War Crimes
===> Bush Administration Torture Scandal
=> Campaign 2008
=> Atlantis Online - Memorial & Biography
===> Atlantis Online - Old Posts
Powered by
EzPortal
Loading...