For first time in history, dinosaur fossils found in Saudi Arabia

For the first time in history, confirmed dinosaur fossils have been found in Saudi Arabia. Rare in the Arabian Peninsula, the finding of the 72-million-year-old tail-bones of the plant-eating titanosaur and a fossilized teeth of a sharp-toothed theropod were discovered in the Adaffa formation, a pile of sandstone and conglomerates deposited during the Late Cretaceous…

Researchers have found fossils of bacteria in northwest Australia’s Pilbara region, that are dated at 3.49 billion-years-old. That’s older than oxygen and just one billion years after Earth’s formation. The fossils, which are textures on the surfaces of sandstone thought to be sculpted by once-living organisms, are believed to be the oldest visible fossils ever…

I’m a big fan of Bill Bryson’s writings and especially loved his A Short History of Nearly Everything book in which he gave an example of the Earth’s history if it had been compressed into a single day. The example highlighted how insignificant our time on Earth has been and really put things in perspective…

Apparently complex brains evolved much earlier than previously thought, as evidenced by a 520-million-year-old fossilized arthropod (the group that comprises crustaceans, arachnids and insects) that is the earliest fossil known to show a brain.

Called “The Great Unconformity”, the Grand Canyon has a 1.2 billion year gap in the rock record. Above the gap is 500 million-year-old sandstone (Cambrian age), a time of billions of shelled marine creatures. Below the gap is metamorphic rock of the Slatherian period aged 1.75 billion years where no fossils exist at all. But…