James William Kitching collected and studied fossils of dinosaurs and early humans [3] in the twentieth century. He worked at the Bernard Price Institute for Paleontological Research in South Africa. During the fifty-three years he worked at the institute, Kitching spent eighteen of those in the field uncovering fossils. Kitching recovered fossils of early human ancestors, later called Australo...

whether enough blood circulated in or around the plates to ensure such a function. Furthermore, while the large, flat plates of Stegosaurus might have been thermoregulatory, it is less easy to imagine this working in the spike-like osteoderms of Kentrosaurus. Another possibility is that the plates had a behavioural function, and were used in either sexual selection (there is no apparent sexual ...

Globular clusters are both primary fossils of galactic evolution and formation ideal laboratories for constraining the low-mass metal-poor stars. RR Lyrae type II Cepheid variables low-mass, radially pulsating stars that trace old-age stellar populations. These standard candles in globular crucial measuring their precise distances and, turn, absolute ages, calibration extragalactic distance sca...

Ecdysozoans (Phyla Arthropoda, Kinorhyncha, Loricifera, Nematoda, Nematomorpha, Onychophora, Priapulida, Tardigrada) are invertebrates bearing a tough, periodically moulted cuticle that predisposes them to exceptional preservation. dominate the oldest exceptionally preserved bilaterian animal biotas in early mid-Cambrian ( c. 520–508 Ma), with possible trace fossils latest Ediacaran (<556 Ma...

In the South African context, computed tomography (CT) has been used applied to individually prepared fossils and small rocks containing fossils, but has not been utilized on large breccia blocks as a means of discovering fossils, and particularly fossil hominins. Previous attempts at CT imaging of rocks from other South African sites for this purpose yielded disappointing results. For this stu...

Theria includes Eutheria and its sister taxon Metatheria. Placentalia includes extant eutherians plus their most recent common ancestor. The oldest eutherian is from 125mya (million years ago). Molecular studies place this origin at about 130-185mya. Older dates cannot be refuted based on fossil evidence as earliest eutherian remains are scarce. Earliest superordinal clades (hence Placentalia) ...

Fossils of macroscopic eukaryotes are rarely older than the Ediacaran Period (635-541 million years (Myr)), and their interpretation remains controversial. Here, we report the discovery of macroscopic fossils from the 1,560-Myr-old Gaoyuzhuang Formation, Yanshan area, North China, that exhibit both large size and regular morphology. Preserved as carbonaceous compressions, the Gaoyuzhuang fossil...