It was 50 years ago in Olduvai Gorge that Louis and Mary Leakey found fragments of teeth and a skull that were part of a male hominid they called Zinjanthropus, or Nutcracker Man, because of his huge teeth. This led to field research programs in Ethiopia and Kenya, the findings of which now dominate discussions of human evolution. To celebrate this occasion, on September 30, 2009, Richard Leakey will be leading a symposium at the Rockefeller University that will examine the development of scientific prehistory research in East Africa since the discovery of the Zinjanthropus fossil.
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June 18, 2009 12:19 PM
Polly want a triceratops? Probably not. But University of Chicago paleontologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Paul Sereno reports this week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B that a dinosaur whose 110-million-year-old skull was found in Mongolia's Gobi desert ate nuts and seeds using a beak like a parrot's.
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University of Michigan paleontologist Philip Gingerich, a member of National Geographic's Committee for Research and Exploration and president-elect of the Paleontological Society, is part of the team behind a breakthrough fossil study that's earning world-wide attention. The fossil bridges the evolutionary split between higher primates such as monkeys, apes, and humans and their more distant relatives such as lemurs, reports National Geographic News.
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