Paleontologist Nigel Hughes has earned one of the highest honors in his field, an achievement made even more remarkable because last year’s winner was another UCR paleontologist — Mary Droser, his wife. Any paleontologist in the world is eligible for the Society for Sedimentary Geology’s Raymond C. Moore Paleontology Medal . It was unintentional that...
The earliest multicellular organisms may have lacked heads, legs, or arms, but pieces of them remain inside of us today, new research shows. According to a UC Riverside study, 555-million-year-old oceanic creatures from the Ediacaran period share genes with today’s animals, including humans. “None of them had heads or skeletons. Many of them probably looked...
A team led by UC Riverside geologists has discovered the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most familiar animals today, including humans. The tiny, wormlike creature, named Ikaria wariootia, is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at either end connected by a gut. The...
Australian officials signed an agreement last night allowing UC Riverside to continue its pioneering research on a government-owned goldmine for unusual fossils. Nilpena Station is a city-sized plot of land in the Australian Outback. It harbors the richest collection on Earth of animal species around 550 million years old. Some of its fossil beds are...
Hundreds of millions of years before there was a chicken or an egg to debate, the first complex animals were evolving in parallel with Earth’s rising oxygen levels. But what came first — animals or oxygen? That question is the central theme of a special issue of Emerging Topics in Life Sciences published Sept. 28...
Earth’s first complex animals were an eclectic bunch that lived in the shallow oceans between 580-540 million years ago. The iconic Dickinsonia — large flat animals with a quilt-like appearance — were joined by tube-shaped organisms, frond-like creatures that looked more like plants, and several dozen other varieties already characterized by scientists. Add to that...
NEWS MEDIA CONTACT Name: Iqbal Pittalwala Tel: (951) 827-6050 E-mail: iqbal@ucr.edu Sponges are one of the simplest forms of multicellular animals. Image credit: Love lab, UC Riverside. RIVERSIDE, Calif. – An international team of scientists from UC Riverside, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions has found the oldest evidence for animals in the...
NEWS MEDIA CONTACT Name: Iqbal Pittalwala Tel: (951) 827-6050 E-mail: iqbal@ucr.edu Mary Droser, a professor of Earth sciences, on a field trip in the South Australian outback. Video shows Mary Droser and James Gehling excavating a Funisia dorothea fossil in South Australia. RIVERSIDE, Calif. -- Two paleontologists studying ancient fossils they excavated in the South...
