Thursday 27 March 2014

latest ancient discoveries of giant creatures



Ancient 'shrimp' was the blue whale of the Cambrian
A BIG shrimp-like animal is the oldest known swimmer that sieved food out of the water, like today's krill and baleen whales.
By half a billion years ago, there were passive filter feeders like sponges sitting on the ocean floor. But palaeontologists thought that swimming filter feeders didn't arise for another 160 million years



Turtle bone found in 1800s had been missing its other half -- till now
by Deborah Netburn
Two halves of the same turtle's arm bone were discovered almost 200 years apart, according to a new study. A fossil miracle? Totally.
"When two pieces of a fossil fit together, they fit perfectly like a puzzle piece," said Jason Schein, an assistant curator of natural history at the New Jersey State Museum, who was in the room when the two bone halves were first reunited. "We were just kind of dumbfounded."
You can see pictures of the two halves in the gallery above, as well as an artist's rendering of the giant sea turtle (with a human diver for scale).

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