Unique mole walking is all thumbs, according to articles in Science (AAAS) News 29 October 2019 and Biology Letters 30 October 2019, doi: 10.1098/rsbl.2019.0503. Most four-legged land mammals walk with their limbs under their body, swinging their front legs back and forth below their shoulder joint. A group of scientists have analysed high speed videos […]
Lucy’s child’ climbed trees, according to articles in ScienceDaily and National Geographic 4 July 2018 and Cosmos 6 July 2018 and Science Advances 4 July 2018, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aar7723. A team of scientists in the USA have studied a foot fossil found with a partial skeleton in Ethiopia in 2002. The skeleton has been identified as […]
T. rex speed limit calculated by scientists, according to BBC News 18 July 2017, ABC News 19 July 2017 and PeerJ doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3420 published online 18 July 2017. A group of scientists in the UK has used a computer modelling technique to estimate how fast T-rex could have moved. Their method takes into account the strength […]
Spring powered ostriches beat humans according to articles in ABC News in Science 27 October 2010 and BBC Earth News 28 October 2010. A team of researchers led by Jonas Rubenson, of the School of Sport Science, Exercise and Health, University of Western Australia have compared how humans and ostriches run to see how much […]
Putting feet in mud shows “dinosaurs and birds are different.” A study reported in Nature vol. 399, pp103-104, 141-144 comparing fossil dinosaur footprints with those produced by present day birds running through mud, showed that birds run by moving their knees, with little movement of the hip and ankle and keep their ankles off the […]
Laetoli footprints are “surprisingly modern” according to articles in ScienceDaily 19 July 2011 and ABC News in Science 21 July 2011. The Laetoli footprints are a series of footprints preserved in rock in Tanzania. Researchers from the UK, Belgium and Japan have used computer imaging techniques to analyse the Laetoli footprints and determine the walking […]
Why dinosaurs ran on two legs, and why most mammals didn’t, according to articles in ScienceDaily and Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2017; 420: 1 DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2017.02.032, published online 27 February 2017. Palaeontologists Scott Persons and Philip Currie of University of Alberta, Canada, have proposed a theory to explain why many dinosaurs became bipedal, i.e. standing […]
More Laetoli footprints found, according to reports in BBC News, and Nature News 14 December 2017, and eLife 5:e19568. doi: 10.7554/eLife.19568, 14 December 2016. In 1976 Mary Leakey and colleagues found fossilised footprints in a layer of volcanic tuff (solidified volcanic ash) in Tanzania dated as 3.66 million years old. In spite of their human-like […]
“Family May Provide Evolution Clue” is the headline of an article on BBC News, 7 Mar 2006, about a family in a remote part of Turkey where four sisters and one brother walk on all fours. One sister can walk on two feet sometimes, and another brother walks on two feet with difficulty. Medical tests […]
Arm swinging not vestigial, according to reports in The Independent, Royal Society News and Reuters, 29 July 2009. Swinging your arms when you walk has been considered an evolutionary leftover from when people used to be four legged creatures. Researchers from the University of Michigan, USA and Delft University of Technology, Netherlands have carried out […]