Adventure Ausrama Blog

Australia has always been seen as remote. Yet new new things are being discovered about its history. It has been identified as the "target" of one of the world's largest asteroid impacts. Two craters found by Andrew Glikson and his team are thought to have been caused by a large meteor which broke into two pieces. Each crater is 200 kilometers in diameter. One of these craters on its own is larger than the impact in Mexico: the Central American collision wiped out the dinosaurs. It isn't the biggest, however. The Sudbury comet did a great deal of damage, but the world's widest crater is the Vredefort in South Africa. The twin craters in Australia have been flattened out over eons of time. They were found by geothermal research. It appears that asteroid impact covers the Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia, a very large area. Seismic traverses is going to be applied next. This will hopefully bring new things to light. If the as...

We know that we are related to sea creatures. Finding which ones are close ancestors is the problem. Dr Garcia-Bellido holds that odd-looking fossils of Nesonektris had cartilage which has the same structure as the "tails" of human embryos. Muscles latch on to notochord cartilage. Findings have been published in BMC Evolutionary Biology by universities of Adelaide and South Australia with the South Australian Museum. The University of New England also took part in the research. The source of the 500 million year old fossil is Kangaroo Island. This region has some of the world's richest fossil beds. vetulicolians lived in the Cambrian period and were filter feeders. Their cartilaged-tails were used for propulsion. This type of connections with humans had been overlooked in the past. ✴ Evolution by Ty Buchanan ✴ http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://adventure--australia.blogspot.com/atom.xml ...

We see the platypus as a quiet curious animal always on the go, but millions of years ago it was twice as big and had vicious teeth. It hunted turtles crayfish and frogs. Paleontologists have called it Platypus Godzilla because it would have been quite vicious. The modern platypus, Obdurodon tharalkooschild, is only half a meter long. Its quiet, secretive life could indicate that it is heading for extinction. Identifying platypus fossils is easy if teeth are found, because they are so different from other species. Platypus teeth are blunt. The animals must have "bruised" their prey to death. Fossils of the ancient platypus were not ancestors of modern platypus. They were a side branch "experimenting' with being a larger size. Just why platypus millions of years old had functioning teeth while modern ones have virtually lost theirs is not known. Despite being good a hunter Godzilla did itself go extinct. Modern tharalkoo live in a narrow niche. ...

Birds are the most diverse creatures on Earth.  Not only have they changed into different species on large continents, they have also adapted specifically to environments on islands. A new classification system is in the form of a circle with increasing diversity as one moves out in time from the center.  different types of birds are correctly located on the figure covering a period of 50 million years. There is not one specific ancestor.  "Base" species take the form  of a circle of time moving out from the center and new kinds of birds branch off directly to the outer edge.  Fast evolving birds are in red; slower ones are drawn in blue. Significantly birds such as woodpeckers often split into new species, while hornbills, for example, did not.  There was more diversification in the Western Hemisphere.  Furthermore, species did not proliferate in the tropics because the climate remained stable there over a long period. http://www.adventure--austral...