Rest in peace, Sam Neill. Thank you for Dr. Alan Grant. You made paleontology look thrilling and full of wonder, and that excitement stuck with so many of us. Safe travels on your next journey.

#Heyuan# | A 12-year-old boy has discovered a well-preserved dinosaur egg fossil near his home in Heyuan, Guangdong, the "Hometown of Dinosaurs in China."🦖🥚 Chen Zixi found the roughly 14-centimeter-wide fossil under a tree. Researchers later found another nearby. Coincidentally, children from the same village discovered Heyuan's first known dinosaur egg nest 30 years ago, marking the beginning of the city's dinosaur fossil research and conservation efforts. Today, the Heyuan Dinosaur Museum houses more than 20,000 dinosaur egg fossils. 🔎🦴 Dive in: #Guangdong# #DinosaurFossils# #DinosaurEgg# #Paleontology# #Fossils# #ChinaDiscovery#

“Two ADHD energy-powered kids and three icons.” Vukan, Co-Founder of @JurassicFi, explains how a lean team covers every layer of the business at the @MetaDAOProject Owners Meeting: “@Sora_i_guess spent three years in marketing at an RWA project that tokenized farmland commodities on Ethereum. It was super cool, but in 2021, it was simply too early.” “I run my own marketing agency and work with @8bitpenis on Ownership Media. Then we have three advisers, each an icon in their own segment.” “Rob brings experience across collectibles and alternative assets. Tzvi works across Solana, tokenization, and RWAs. Wang has spent around 30 years in paleontology.” “When we want to scale and acquire more assets, we really don’t need to keep hiring. We already have two ADHD energy-powered kids and three specialists covering each part of the model.” - @vukan0x Jurassic Finance is building with a compact team spanning marketing, tokenization, alternative assets, and deep paleontology expertise.

“In the first hour, 50% was done. In three hours, the raise was complete.” Vukan, Co-Founder of @JurassicFi, explains how early commitments created momentum for the project’s raise at the @MetaDAOProject Owners Meeting: “We built traction through two campaigns, then reached out across our Telegram groups and to different funds for commitments we could count on from the first hour. Once 50% was filled in the first hour and the raise was completed within three hours, the momentum compounded. We reached $2M in commitments within 24 hours and eventually finished with $15M. We also took 50% of the performance package and used just 3% to bring on three advisers under the same unlock terms as the team. That added expertise across rare spirits, alternative assets, and more than 30 years of experience in paleontology and the dinosaur market. The performance package can be one of the strongest tools for attracting people who materially improve the business.” - @vukan0x Jurassic Finance turned early conviction into visible momentum, then used its long-term incentives to bring specialized expertise into the company.

#Science# | 🦖🥚 Urban Dinosaur Discovery! Well-preserved dinosaur egg fossils have been discovered in #Haizhu# District, marking a rare find within #Guangzhou#'s bustling urban center. First spotted by a resident, the Late Cretaceous fossils have been transferred to the city's geological survey institute for 3D scanning and age dating. They will eventually be exhibited to showcase the PRD's ancient, lush prehistoric ecosystem. Have a look😮: #DinosaurFossils# #Paleontology# #Guangdong# #China#

The croc family tree may be getting a new branch. Analyzing fossilized remains discovered in the same bedrock that built the Great Sphinx, paleontologists newly identified a crocodilian species that once roamed a shallow sea in what’s now Egypt about 45 million years ago.

The skeleton that slandered an entire species! August 1908. Three French brothers digging in a small limestone cave near La Chapelle-aux-Saints pulled a nearly complete human form out of the earth. Not scattered fragments. A body. Skull, spine, ribs, arms, legs. An old man laid in a shallow pit some 60,000 years earlier. He should of been a revelation. Instead he became a smear campaign. Marcellin Boule was one of the most powerful paleontologists in France and he spent years on those bones. When he published the reconstruction between 1911 and 1913, the world met a creature that could barely stand. Head thrust forward. Spine almost straight. Hips and knees bent. Big toe splayed like an ape’s. Boule called him uncouth, repellent, with only a “rudimentary psychic nature.” Newspapers and textbooks ran with it. Artists drew a hairy slouching brute shambling through Ice Age Europe with a club. That image stuck for half a century. Every cartoon caveman, every museum mural, every cheap insult about “Neanderthal thinking” traces back to this one skeleton. One old man. One scientists reconstruction. An entire species convicted of being primitive. Here is what Boule actually had on the table. The man was elderly by Ice Age standards, estimates now put him in his 50s or 60s, which is an extraodinary age for a hunter-gatherer. He had lost nearly every tooth. His jaw had resorbed. His left hip was a wreck of osteoarthritis. Neck and upper back locked up with degenerative joint disease. Healed rib fracture too. He almost certainly needed others to grind his food. He almost certainly needed help walking in those last years. Boule saw pathology and treated it as design. He saw an infirm elder and declared a species. The 1909 reconstruction that locked the stereotype in place showed a slouched figure next to an upright modern human, like the difference was evolutionary destiny instead of a bad hip. Popular illustrations went further. The “Man of Twenty Thousand Years Ago” got drawn as a shambling club-wielding ape-man coming out of a cave. That picture had almost nothing to do with how the living person actually moved. The skull itself is striking, massive brow, long low vault, huge nasal opening. Boule read those features as proof of a mind closer to an ape than to us. He was wrong about that too. The correction took decades. In 1957 William Straus and A.J.E. Cave went back over the bones and said the quiet part out loud. The hunched posture wasn’t typical Neanderthal anatomy. It was the posture of a man with severe deforming osteoarthritis. Take the disease away and the skeleton stands up. Later Erik Trinkaus argued Boule’s error wasn’t only medical. It was ideological. Boule didn’t want Neanderthals on the direct line to modern humans. A stooped dim-witted side branch was convenient. In 2019 Martin Haeusler and colleagues built a virtual reconstruction of the Old Man’s pelvis and spine. The numbers were blunt. His pelvic incidence predicted a lumbar curve of about 52 degrees, right in the modern human range. Wear patterns on the vertebrae showed he had the same S-shaped spine we use to walk upright. A hunched straight-backed Neanderthal is, as Haeusler put it, biomechanicly absurd. The Old Man did not slouch because he was primitive but because he was old, in pain, and still alive. A person who cannot chew solid food does not survive winters in Ice Age France without help. Somebody with a destroyed hip and a fused neck does not keep up with a mobile hunting band unless the band slows down for him. The cave itself looks like a burial, rectangular pit, body placed with care. Whether every claimed Neanderthal grave holds up is still argued. This one is among the strongest. The man who got used to prove Neanderthals were barely human is one of the best pieces of evidence that they were human, in the only sense that actually matters. They kept thier wounded. They fed their elderly. They put a body in the ground.

New dinosaur just dropped Palaeontologists have officially described Tromerosaurus solumons, a previously unknown tyrannosaur that lived in what is now Alberta, Canada. The fossils were found more than a decade ago and have only now been identified as a new species

Artifacts from 9,000 feet up are reshaping our understanding of North America’s earliest residents. The first sign that human history here was different emerged in 1968. Now, clues arrive steadily—evidence that the Clovis people may have occupied the Greater Yellowstone high country 13,000 years ago, when experts believed the region was buried under glacial ice. Those experts could be challenged by finds from the Beartooth Mountains at 9,000 feet. Together with the discovery of a Clovis-era child’s remains over 50 years ago, new research from Montana raises questions about early inhabitants of what is now the United States. Researchers are intent on finding answers. Archaeologist Scott Dersam noted that the sediment in the area should not exist. “I wouldn’t say it’s impossible,” he told Nick Mott in a detailed report for Mountain Journal, “but in standard paleoecology for the surrounding ecosystem, all glaciology experts agree this shouldn’t be present given the environment we assume.” Ancient Clovis Toolbox: Were Prehistoric Nomads DIYers? A Colorado man found archaeological value while digging in his yard—a cache of 83 shaped stones that proved to be tools made by the Clovis people 13,000 years ago.These sites may now be the highest and oldest human habitations in North America. “We could have the oldest Clovis sites here, in a place and ecosystem that shouldn’t exist,” Dersam said. “It’s more than a wrench in the current paradigm. It’s a full blow to the chest.” The questions began in 1968, when construction workers uncovered the so-called “Clovis Child” at the Anzick Site in Park County, north of Yellowstone National Park near Bozeman, Montana. The oldest known Clovis burial included a young child, an antler, and about 100 stone artifacts. Testing by Texas A&M, along with colleagues from the University of Oxford and Stafford Research of Colorado, led Michael Waters to state that the remains and artifacts were “confidently shown to be the same age and date between 12,725 and 12,900 years ago.” The Clovis people represent the first widespread prehistoric culture in North America, emerging around 13,000 years ago. Experts believe they originated south of the large ice sheets covering Canada and were direct descendants of the earliest arrivals in the New World roughly 15,000 years ago.The Clovis people are recognized for stone spear tips with grooved bases, called the Clovis point. These items appear across the United States, yet Dersam’s team has now located them in the Beartooth Mountains, a region once thought impossible for such finds. Dersam noted that a donation from a former game warden, gathered from the 1950s through the 1970s, clarified the high-elevation site. “Only after he gave the totality of his collection did we realize it’s the largest and most dense high-elevation lithic collection anywhere in North America,” Dersam said. In 2022, heavy rain and snow triggered flooding that reshaped sediment layers high in the Beartooths, revealing many artifacts. “Things just absolutely exploded,” he said. Known for hunting mammoths on the plains, the Clovis people probably adapted well to Montana’s alpine area, which had been said to be covered by the Pinedale Glacier. “This is the first time we don’t have just one or two Clovis points,” Dersam said. “We have full sites. Everything but the kitchen sink.” The evidence suggests an unknown chapter of Montana’s ancient ecosystem, challenging the idea that ice covered it and showing instead that it was full of mammoths, bison, and, apparently, an entire ancient culture.