British scientists have discovered a “treasure trove” of Charles Darwin fossils that have been lost for more than 150-years. The discovery was made in an old wooden cabinet in the British Geological Survey.

Dr. Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleontologist at Royal Holloway, made the discovery. Falcon Lang said:

“It took me a while just to convince myself that it was Darwin’s signature on the slide… Inside the drawer were hundreds of beautiful glass slides made by polishing fossil plants into thin translucent sheets.”

The Associated Press reports that Falcon-Lang recovered a collection of 314 slides of specimens. The specimens were collected by Darwin and contemporaries like  John Hooker, a botanist and friend of Darwin, and the Rev. John Henslow, Darwin’s mentor at Cambridge.

Falcon-Lang said that the first Darwin fossil he picked up was from Darwin’s famous trip on the HMS Beagle in 1834. The BBC reports that it was on this trip when Darwin first started to develop his theory of evolution.

Falcon-Lang said:

“To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary. We can see there’s more to learn. There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn’t know existed.”

Lang says that Darwin’s fossils may have been misplaced because in 1834 he was not a well-known scientist. Royal Holloway, of the University of London, said that Hooker indexed the specimens incorrectly as he was rushing out for an expedition to the Himalayas. The “unregistered” fossils moved from museum to museum until they landed at the British Geological Survey more than 100 years ago.

Dr. John Ludden, executive director of the Geological Survey, said:

“This is quite a remarkable discovery. It really makes one wonder what else might be hiding in our collections.”

Lost Darwin Fossils Rediscovered 150-Years Later is a post from: The Inquisitr

If a new scientific theory is correct all life on Earth shares a common organism that once dominated the Earth’s oceans. Dubbed LUCA the study posits that the organism was a massive network of cells, all of which relied on one another to survive during the early years of Earth’s harsh formation.

According to the New Scientist it’s believed that cells were unable to make the exact proteins they required and instead swapped them out which in turn created a huge gene pool that eventually spawned all life on earth.

2.9 billion years ago as oxygen first appeared in the atmosphere the cells split off into single-celled bacteria, archaea and complex cells called eukaryotes, the building blocks for all animals and plants on earth.

While not all scientists are taking the theory seriously one MIT scientist notes:

“It’s a plausible idea” be he “can’t tell if it’s true.”

Given our close genetic relationship to other organisms it seems like a plausible possibility. Do you think all living things on Earth may have come from one giant “super-organism.”

[Image via ShutterStock.com]

Massive Organism Spawned All Life On Earth Says New Theory is a post from: The Inquisitr

Lynn Margulis, a prominent figure in the study of evolutionary biology, died this past Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, The New York Times reports. She was 73. Her son, Dorion Sagan, told The New York Times that Margulis’ death followed five days after she suffered a hemorrhagic stroke.

Born in 1938 in Chicago, Margulis enrolled in the University of Chicago at the age of 14. At 19, she married famous astronomer Carl Sagan, who she had three sons with, Dorion Sagan, Jeremy Sagan, Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma, and one daughter, Jennifer Margulis.

Margulis was best known for challenging neo-Darwinist beliefs that random mutation was the primary evolution mechanism. She argued that symbiosis was a much more important mechanism, suggesting that cells work together, merge and reproduce.

She showed that through the process of symbiogenesis, complex cells could be born from the merger and reproduction of less complicated cells such as bacteria. Her work underscored the idea that the evolutionary process was evident in microorganisms far before it would be visible at the level of species, NYT reports.

“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” she wrote, according to The New York Times. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.”

Source: The New York Times

Lynn Margulis, prominent evolutionary biologist, dies at 73 is a post from: The Inquisitr

The fossils, the partial skeletons of a juvenile male and adult female, reportedly date back to 1.98 million years ago, from an era notoriously lacking in evidence of possible human relatives.

“The many very advanced features found in the brain and body, and the earlier date make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus, the genus Homo, more so than previous discoveries,” said Lee Berger, at the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

About 4 feet tall each, the two skeletons of the Australopithecus sediba ( “southern wellspring ape”) species were discovered in 2008 and first reported last year from the Malapa site in South Africa, a series of exposed ancient caves.

Researchers say that the vanished species climbed trees with low-hanging arms like orangutans but also walked on the ground like people and possessed human-like hands capable of grabbing sticks and rocks.

That find may force a re-evaluation of the process of evolution because many researchers had previously associated development of a human-like pelvis with enlargement of the brain, but in each of the two fossils found, the brain was still small.

“This is what evolutionary theory would predict, exactly this confusion, this mix of features of Australopithecines and Homo,” Darryl de Ruiter, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University who contributed to the research, said.

After the discovery, the children of South Africa were invited to name the child, which they called “Karabo,” meaning “answer” in the local Tswana language.

According to Berger, Karabo would have been aged 10 to 13 in terms of human development; the female – who remains unnamed – was in her 20s and there are indications that she may have given birth once. The researchers are not sure if the two were related.

Image & Source via CBS News

Human Ancestor Fossil Possibly Discovered In Africa is a post from: The Inquisitr

Scientists have discovered that unlike other unpleasant feelings, a broken heart actually activates the brain’s “pain matrix,” a region of the organ that actually exists.

Columbia University psychology professor Edward Smith said that even anger and fear don’t cause the pain matrix flare up seen when romantic rejection occurs. A study of 40 people was recently published in the medical journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which participants were shown images of a lost love and a friend of the same gender. The visual stimulation was measured against warm and hot sensations on the skin, and the individuals were asked to rate the sensations.

Ethan Kross, a social psychologist at the University of Michigan, explained the findings:

“Spilling a hot cup of coffee on yourself and thinking about how rejected you feel when you look at the picture of a person that you recently experienced an unwanted breakup with may seem to elicit very different types of pain… But this research shows that they may be even more similar than initially thought.”

Smith theorized that early humans were at a far greater risk when abandoned by loved ones, possibly causing us to develop a strong aversion to rejection.

Broken heart activates same pain sensors as actual, physical burn is a post from: The Inquisitr

Missing Link Found – Darwinius masillae

Hurm says the fossil, known in science as Darwinius masillae, bridges an important evolutionary gap between higher primates such as monkeys and apes and lemurs, and humans. Ida represents “the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor.”

The extremely well preserved lemur-like skeleton has characteristics common to modern primates, like grasping hands, opposable thumbs, clawless digits with fingernails, and relatively short, strong limbs. The skeleton has amazing detail, even the outline of the animal’s fur can be seen.

Brian Richmond, a biological anthropologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., says:

“This specimen looks like a really early fossil monkey that belongs to the group that includes us. [Ida] is one of the important branching points on the evolutionary tree, but it’s not the only branching point.”

This is an exciting discovery that bridges the gap between the different primates, but there are still many gaps to be filled; mainly the one where primates and humans branch off to develop as unique species.

And this new discovery has brought out the creationists who argue that there is no relation between primates and humans and that’s why a true missing link will never be found – that humans are a unique and share nothing in common with other species. That we were created separately, regardless of what science proves.

So, dear Inquisitr readers – did you evolve like everything else on this planet, or were you created by ???

Missing Link Found – Score: Evolution 1,831,669, Creationists still 0 is a post from: The Inquisitr