Giants / Kaum Aad / Gergasi [merged : mahathirGX, sephia_liza]

is it, betul ke nih????

hamizao

Benar, Goliath dikatakan seorang Giant.

Berikutnya satu senarai yg Hami baru jumpa berkenaan puak2 giant dalam Bible:

Nephilim
Kenites
Kenizzites
Kadmonites
Hittites
Perizzites
Rephaims
Amorites
Canaanites
Zuzims
Emins
Zebusites
Hivites
Anakims
Horims
Aviums
Caphtorims
Zamzummins

Ada lain2 nama yang digunakan di tempat2 lain. Hami teringat Gog & Magog juga dikatakan giants.

[ Last edited by  hamizao at 21-4-2006 12:51 PM ]

Nicole

terima kasih berkongsi info.... tapi gambar tu dah terbukti ke superimpose.....

HangPC2

Originally posted by hamizao at 21-12-2005 05:22 PM
Benar, Goliath dikatakan seorang Giant.

Berikutnya satu senarai yg Hami baru jumpa berkenaan puak2 giant dalam Bible:

Nephilim
Kenites
Kenizzites
Kadmonites
Hittites
Perizzites
Rephaims ...

gog & magog ni macam yakjuj makjuj

hamizao

Originally posted by HangPC2 at 27-12-2005 10:15 AM

gog & magog ni macam yakjuj makjuj

Benar, HangPC

sephia_liza

Giant Human Bones Found in Middle East

Blanco Fossil Museum sculpted this femur after receiving following letter:

Dear Christian Friends, I was born and lived in the Middle East from 1938 to 1968. I was Ain-Tell and Euphrates water works Engineer and was very interested in archaeology and history and had some very interesting findings, some of which may sound unbelievable.

I have brought with me a few silex arrow heads, etc., from the very battle-field where King Nebuchadnezzar and Pharo-Necho抯 armies fought. And what about the giants mentioned in Genesis?

In south-east Turkey in the Euphrates Valley and in Homs and at Uran-Zohra, tombs of about four meters long once existed, but now roads and other construction work has destroyed the spots. At two places, when unearthed because of construction work, the leg bones were measured about 120 cms (47.24 inches).

It sounds unbelievable. I have lived with my family at Ain-Tell for more than 14 years at the very spot where King Nebuchadnezzar had his headquarters after the battle of Charcamish, where I dug the graves of kings?officers and found their skeletons like sponge, and when you touch them they become like white ash, with spears and silex and obsidian tools and ammunition laying by.

This giant stood 14-16 ft tall. In his book Fossils Facts & Fantasies, Joe Taylor cites several accounts of giant human skeletons or depictions discovered in Egypt, Italy, Patagonia in Argentina, and the western US.



GIGANTOPITHECUS" & "MEGANTHROPUS"

There is no controversy about these facts; there was a race or group of people found in Australia called "meganthropus" by anthropologists. These people were of very large size--estimated between 7 to 12 feet tall, depending on what source you read.
These people were found with mega tool artifacts, so their humaness is difficult to question. Four jaw fragments and thousands of teeth have been found in China of "gigantopithecus blacki"--named after the discover. Based on the size of the teeth and deep jaws, its size has been estimated at around 10 feet and as tall as 12 feet, 1200 pounds. (Photo:Giant human femur reportedly found in Turkey)

The "problem" is that human fossils are the rarest of all, and generally, only the hardest bones, jaws, teeth and skulls survive. As with most "early man" artistic recreations, a great deal of the individual is surmised.

The question is, is gigantopithecus a man or an ape? I personally have no opinion, but it is clear that very large men did live once. Scientists are of course afraid of being ridiculed and rather than estimate the size of the individuals possessing larger skulls and teeth than "us", they prefer to use the term robust.

Anthropologists spend quite a bit of time trying to decide what is an ape, what is a man, who they believe descended from who and the like. Now, most consider gigantopithecus an ape,(its more convenient to the theory of evol) but the co-discover at least, and many others still see no difference between the teeth and jaws of Giganto than other so-called ancestors.

As we said, everyone believes that meganthropus with his mega-tools was a "man". Tools have been found in the same area as giganto as well, but the tendency has been to associate them with other "types' found at the same location.


Giant Footprint Found in Solid Granite in 2002

A Ramona man has found what looks to be a footprint from Bigfoot. The giant fossilized footprint suggests the yeti could have once lived in the nearby mountains.

It's one heck of a climb to see the footprint; more than a thousand feet up a rugged mountain in the Cleveland National Forest. And James Snyder's house sits right at the bottom.

"I go out of my way to make a slip trail where nobody else has been and I was actually looking for gold," said Snyder.

That was back in February. But instead of finding gold on Gowers Mountain, Snyder found a giant fossilized footprint, at least it looks like one, embedded in solid granite.

The footprint was found in what becomes a creek bed during the rainy season. It looks as though something big crossed the creek a long time ago leaving its footprint behind.

What made it and when? Who knows. But Snyder is convinced it was a Yeti or sasquatch or Bigfoot. "When I saw it I told my buddy, I said I found Bigfoot up there," said Snyder.

He hopes someone who knows about this sort of thing will contact him. "But the neat thing about it to me, is most of your Bigfoots, or their casts or whatnot, come out of snow that you can't go back and check, or muddy soil, where as soon as you get a hard rain, well that's gone too.

This is, well we can look at it. We can study it. We can bring scientists here," said Snyder. But it won't be easy. The terrain at the top of Mt. Gowers looks like Mars, and it's about as hard to get to.

You can actually go see the footprint if you're prepared to walk an hour and a half, and that's only if you know where you're going. But it's certainly worth the trip. That is, if you're interested in seeing one really BIG foot.
Unfortunately, nothing else but the leg and foot existed in the rock." Strange Relics from the Depths of the Earth--Jochmans


GIGANTOPITHECUS

Since Neanderthal Man is usually considered as a "race," the possibility that racial characteristics of this kind could in fact be the result of pituitary or other glandular disturbance, is greatly strengthened by the case of Maurice Tillet.

We thus have, in addition to the influences of diet and eating habits, the possible influences of glandular abnormality. It is conceivable that the giantism which has been found to characterize some early fossils of man, could be traced to the same factor. In this case history as opposed to genetics, in Portmann's sense of the terms, would possibly explain Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus, and so forth, as well as the grossness of some European forms; and any attempt to fit them into a genetic series would be a waste of time."The Supposed Evolution of the Human Skull

"According to Ciochon et al. (1990), Gigantopithecus blacki was 10 feet tall and weighed 1,200 pounds. This is speculative, since it is with some uncertainty that one reconstructs such a massive creature from a few jaw bones and teeth, however many. The way they arrived at this picture was first to estimate the size of the head from the jaw, and then to use a head/body ratio of 1:6.5 in order to determine the body size. For comparison they cite a head/body ratio of 1:8 for the Australopithecus afarensis specimen known as 'Lucy'.

The more conservative ratio for Gigantopithecus was arrived at out of consideration of the massive jaw as an adaptation to the mastication of fibrous plant matter (probably bamboo). Gigantopithecus was probably proportionally a markedly big jawed creature.

For the head shape they based their assumptions on the orangutan, since evolutionarily they place Gigantopithecus on the same line as the orangutan, finding a common ancestor for them both in Sivapithecus.

However, the orangutan could not serve as a model for the body, since it is unlikely that a 1,200 pound ape would be as arboreal. Therefore they chose the largest primates known, the gorilla and the extinct giant baboon Theropithecus oswaldi, as their models for the body.


The State of the Science

This giant skull, embedded in solid rock, presents several problems for materialists.

"And it may seem harmless to you now that its been exposed. But, did you know that over 500 people obtained their PhD's by writing their thesis on "the Piltdown Man"? I dare say, no one took back those PhDs after it was exposed, and those people taught hundreds of thousands of people." Wyatt, Newletter Five

In 1982 Dr. Lyall Watson stated: "The fossils that decorate our family tree are so scarce that there are still more scientists than specimens. The remarkable fact is that all of the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a single coffin!"

Likewise, a 1994 article in Time Magazine admitted that: "Yet despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains maddeningly sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that doesn't fit into the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major discovery has put deep cracks in the conventional wisdom and forced scientists to concoct new theories, amid furious debate."

Prior to more recent developments of techniques for dating by means of radioactive materials, there were fundamentally only two methods of estimating the age of a fossil. The first was the geological level at which the specimen was found.

The second, applying more particularly to human fossils, was the general appearance: whether apish and "primitive," or essentially like modern man. These two criteria are still largely applied, since the majority of the more ancient remains of early man are completely fossilized and C-14 methods of dating cannot be used.

But it has long been recognized that if the fossil remains of early man are arranged according to their degree of primitiveness, the order will be found to contradict the series arranged on the basis of antiquity as established by the levels at which they are found."

[ Last edited by sephia_liza at 26-2-2006 01:27 PM ]

alphawolf

Dalam Quran pun diceritakan yang manusia2 dulu besar2

p.s. Sephia...buat poll tu x menjadi ke?

sephia_liza

[/img]
The Patagonian Giants

Of Interest here is not so much the height of the then current inhabitants of the Island, who are believed to have been tall but were probably not giants. However, there were as we抳e seen in other places quite a few stories about finding extremely large skeletons of previous inhabitants.

The first europeans to sail along the patagonian costs were Ferdinand of Magallanes and his crew in 1520. Their first meeting with the aborigins (Tehuelches) was recorded by Antonio Pigafetta, the chronicler of the expedition, in a by now famous passage:

"One day, when no one was expecting it, we saw a giant, completely naked, by the sea. He danced and jumped and, singing, spread sand and dust over his head...He was so tall that the tallest among us reached only to his waist. He was truly well built...The captain named these kind of people Pataghoni. They have no houses but huts, like the Egyptians.

They live on raw meat and eat a kind of sweet root which they call capac. The two giants we had on board ship ate their way through a large basket of biscuits, and ate rats without skinning them. They used to drink a half bucket of water at once.

Photo: Left On the picture on the left you can see the "giants" depicted in the tip of South America on a map of 1562 . It is a common belief that the name Patagons alluded to the apparently outstanding foot size of the Tehuelches.

Center is an engraving from the cover of 揂 Voyage round the World, in his Majesty's ship the Dolphin, commanded by the Hon. Comm. Byron, 1767?and reads: "A sailor giving a Patagonian woman a piece of bread for her baby.

On the right is a detail from another engraving of the period and shows soldiers unearthing a giant skeleton and slaying a large lion.

junkredish

kat mesia pon ada giant, bigfoot.

HangPC2

ala tengok kubur orang dulu laa... memang panjang

sephia_liza

Twenty Giant Skeletons Found

A mound near Toledo, Ohio, held 20 skeletons, seated and facing east with jaws and teeth "twice as large as those of present day people," and besides each was a large bowl with "curiously wrought hieroglyphic figures." (Chicago Record, Oct. 24, 1895; cited by Ron G. Dobbins, NEARA Journal, v13, fall 1978)

Nine Foot Skeleton Found

George W. Hill, M.D., dug out a skeleton "of unusual size" in a mound of Ashland County, Ohio. In 1879, a nine-foot, eight-inch skeleton was excavated from a mound near Brewersville, Indiana(Indianapolis News, Nov 10, 1975 Giant Skeletons

sephia_liza

Today, you can squish the tiny bugs, but 300 million years ago, 8-foot-long millipedes were in control of the landscape, and humans weren't even a gleam in evolution's eye.

New Mexico is now a world record holder of such "exquisitely grotesque creatures," as one worker at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science calls them.

Evidence of the largest arthropleura - its technical name - ever found was recovered by the museum on Friday.

"In today's world, you couldn't have a bug this big," said Spencer Lucas, paleontology curator at the museum. "This is basically the Tyrannosaurus of the Pennsylvanian period, millions of years before dinosaurs evolved. If you took a time machine back, you'd definitely want to check your sleeping bag for these suckers before getting in." The Pennsylvanian time period lasted from 325 to 280 million years ago.

The museum has not found the bug itself. What it did find in a remote canyon near Espa駉la were the fossilized tracks of such a creature - which looks like a 3-by-8 speed bump with flat wings holding hundreds of nasty, ribbed, horseshoe-shaped feet.


"This is a very spectacular thing," said Adrian Hunt, director of the museum, who went out in the field with the team to recover it. "Think of it as a much bigger cross between a millipede and a centipede. It probably lived in swampy forest debris. Something like this has never been found before in the Western United States."

Evidence of the creatures has also been found in Nova Scotia and Scotland, but Jorg Schneider, an international expert on them and a paleontologist from the Freiberg Mining Academy in Germany, said New Mexico's find is evidence of the biggest arthropleura ever.

The second-largest creature was probably a few inches smaller than the one found in New Mexico. The New Mexico track is 39.3 centimeters wide, compared with the second-largest track, in Scotland, which is 36 centimeters wide, Schneider said.

Schnieder came to New Mexico for a two-week visit to look at the track and other New Mexico rocks from the same time period, he said.

"One question we have is, could such a large beast live on plant material only?" Schneider said. "In millipedes from the modern era, we know that scolopender (a type of millipede) is a predator.

Possibly these big extinct versions also ate other animals. This was the top of the food chain - with no natural enemy - for about 40 to 50 million years during the Pennsylvanian."

The creatures might have been vegetarians, but their large size suggests they might have eaten early reptiles that later evolved into dinosaurs and mammals, Schneider said. One favorite snack could have been the pelycosaur, a relative of the dimetrodon, a small, sail-backed lizard common in that age, Lucas said.

"We're still really not sure what they ate," Lucas said. "This guy was probably out patrolling the forest floor eating smaller bugs - which were still pretty big by today's standards - and maybe eating small vertebrates. New Mexico was near the equator then, and the land was much warmer and wetter."

sephia_liza

"The Bible says that before the flood, men lived as long as 900 years and then some. If men lived that long, why wouldn't the animals? And if they did live that long, note this next fact: "...a reptile has the potential of growing throughout its life..." Unlike other animals, the reptile has no "cutoff" mechanism whereby it stops growing in size.

So, even if reptiles lived only half as long as pre-flood men, we would have to expect gigantic reptiles before the flood.

John MacKay once told me that crocodiles (or was it alligators?) grew at the rate of 20 or so feet per 100 years. If that's the case, there should be giant alligators fossils, right?

In 1991, alligator bones were found on the banks of the Amazon River-the skull was almost 5 feet long. Based on this, scientists estimated its height to have been 8 feet (when walking) and its length 40 feet (the size of a railroad boxcar).

"Professor Carl Frailey, from Overland Park, Kansas, said the creature probably weighed around 12 tonnes. `This would make it about a tonne heavier than Tyrannosaurus Rex... the mightiest of dinosaur predators', he said." In short, if reptiles today lived longer, they would be "dinosaurs" in a few hundred years."(super croc image from National Geographic)

sephia_liza

This time of year, fishers along the banks of the Mekong River in the village of Chiang Khong in northern Thailand wait expectant, as they have for hundreds of years, for the arrival and harvest of giant catfish. But this year the catfish may never come.

"No fish have been captured in Thailand since 2001 and the giant catfish is in danger of disappearing from Thailand completely," said Zeb Hogan, a fisheries biologist at the University of California at Davis.

Hogan leads the Mekong Fish Conservation Project, an effort to protect vulnerable populations of migratory fish in the Mekong River Basin, including the critically endangered Mekong giant catfish (Pangasianodon gigas). The catfish is one of several fish species presently endangered in the watershed.


The project is supported by the National Geographic Society's Conservation Trust, the Cambodian Department of Fisheries, and the conservation group Save Cambodia's Wildlife.

Fish Threats

Called Pla Buek in Thai, the giant catfish can weigh as much as 650 pounds (300 kilograms) and measure up to 10 feet (3 meters) in length. They are the largest scaleless freshwater fish in the world. Chainarong Sretthachau, director of the conservation group Southeast Asia Rivers Network in Chiang Mai, Thailand, said threats to the giant catfish include commercial fishing, their touting to tourists as a food said to impart wisdom, and dynamite blasting of their spawning ground.

"The rapids and whirlpool ecosystem in Chiang Khong-Chiang Saen is the only area in the Mekong that giant catfish use as a spawning ground and it will be destroyed by Mekong rapids blasting," said Sretthachau.

The blasting project is part of navigation channel improvements planned by the governments of China, Burma, Thailand, and Lao People's Democratic Republic. According to Sretthachau, the spawning ground rapids will be dynamited in December.

As part of their project, Hogan and his colleague Heng Kong, a researcher with Cambodia's Department of Fisheries, buy live fish from fishers in Cambodia. They weigh and measure the fish, gather DNA samples for genetic studies, tag endangered fish, and release them back into the wild.

Over the short-term, the project keeps a handful of endangered fish, including the giant catfish, alive as researchers gain insight into fish migration patterns, habitat use, and mortality rates. "In the longer term, we hope our migration studies and environmental awareness campaign will lead toward more sustainable management of Cambodia's fisheries," said Hogan.

Buy and Release

Hogan launched the conservation project in Chiang Khong, Thailand, in 2000 but moved it to Cambodia in 2001 due to the collapse of Thailand's giant catfish fishery. "Cambodia is now the last place in the world where the giant catfish is captured on a regular basis," he said.

But Cambodia's giant catfish numbers are also low. Fishers along the Tonle Sap River, a tributary to the Mekong, set bag nets from October to December. In 2000, fishers hauled out 11 giant catfish. In 2001 they caught seven. In 2002 they caught just five...

sephia_liza

The bi-valve, ocean dwelling mollusks indicate quite obviously that at one time, despite the high altitude, that these mountains had once been under water梐s would happen in say梐 worldwide flood.

The fossils were found by Cuban paleontologist, Arturo Vildozola near the town of Acostambo in January of 2001. The fossilized oysters (Plagiostoma giganteum) reached a width of 12 feet and weighed up to 650 pounds.

Vildozola places the age of the fossils at ?00 million years?(sic) . The fossils were disseminated over a wide area. The oysters were found closed suggesting that they had not been eaten, or had died a natural death. The shells of dead oysters tend to open and the fact that they were closed suggests that they were prevented from opening by burial in silt and earth.

Source: Tourism Circuit, USA Today

sephia_liza

ALICE SPRINGS, Australia (CNN) -- The remains of giant geese, some weighing up to 500 kilograms, or more than half a ton, have been discovered in the central Australian desert.

Paleontologist Peter Murray, from the Museum of Central Australia, told CNN Thursday the giant, flightless birds were originally thought to be related to ostriches or emus. But as more bones were unearthed it became apparent they were "definitely geese of some kind".

The fossils are located at Alcoota, about 150 kilometers (95 miles) north east of the central Australian town of Alice Springs. Murray said there were three species of giant goose at the site; two smaller types weighing between 150 kilograms and 200 kilograms, and the larger Dromornis Stirtoni, which tipped the scales at a massive 500 kilograms.

The giant birds -- thought to be the largest that ever lived -- roamed central Australia from "15 million years ago" up until just 30,000 years ago.

The environment is believed to have been vastly different from today's desert conditions, with forests, grasslands and a plentiful water supply. Murray said the latest archeological dig at the site had revealed larger numbers of the smaller species of birds, but they had yet to find a skull.

The team was hoping further excavations over the next few weeks would unearth a skull, enhancing their understanding of the birds. Skulls found of the larger birds show the giant geese had huge beaks and jaws capable of great force but did not have the beak or claws of a carnivore. As a result, it is uncertain what the giant birds may have eaten.

sephia_liza

In January 1993, three hikers in New Zealand  Craigieburn Range (west of the city of Christchurch) reportedly saw a roughly 6 foot tall flightless bird.

They saw it at a distance of approximately 115 to 130 feet for about 30 seconds and managed to take a grainy photo before it ran off into the forest. They believe it was a moa.

The first humans known on the islands, the Maoris, arrived about 1000 years ago. The birds were believed to have become extinct before 1769 when the first Europeans arrived.

There were sporadic sightings in the 19th century, and although many expeditions looked for moas, no live or recently dead specimens were found.

New Zealand scientists admit a few birds may have survived into the 19th century, however a possible 20th century survival has been dismissed and sightings were generally ignored.

The three hikers explored the spot were the bird was seen and photographed what they believed were tracks it had left. They kept the sighting to themselves for two days until the 35mm film was developed and they could make an official report to the Department of Conservation (DOC).

The witnesses were apparently credible and the agency seemed impressed, making tentative plans for field work in the sighting area. Although DOC had developed a theoretical management plan for moas several years earlier, like true bureaucrats, they did no field work to follow up the report.

No one went to the site before rain washed away possible evidence such as footprints, dung, or feathers. Three days after the report was filed, five days after the sighting, the report was made public.

As readers may have guessed, there was an ensuing media circus, false allegations of one of the hikers being a practical joker were levied and serious scientific interest dried up. Many scientists appear to have a genuine phobia to public criticism that has repeatedly slowed confirmation of new discoveries and has crippled many investigations.

Independent photographic analysis by the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch shows promising results. The analysis confirmed the approximate size and distance by the hikers. The image was blurry, but three-dimensional?a silhouette cut out and a model of a moa had been ruled out.

There had been speculation that an emu or ostrich (both large and non-native birds) could have caused the sighting, but neither are large enough and no escaped emus or ostriches are known on the island.

The analysis also ruled out 4 legged animals such as red deer (introduced from Europe) or a llama (possibly escaped).

The conclusions were: it was a bird, a very large bird with a thickly feathered neck?area. Photo analysis of the negative produced no further details. The DOC, which had already publicly denounced the sighting after the media uproar, finally expressed interest in examining the negative. However, the cameraman was understandably unreceptive to the organization.

sephia_liza

Paleontologists call it the Cinderella syndrome: Like Prince Charming with his glass slipper, they often identify fossil tracks by simply figuring out which animal's foot best fits the print.

When John Patterson stumbled across what could be one of the biggest fossil finds in the Northwest, a fairy-tale ending seemed assured. The three-toed track he found near the Green River in 1992 was a near-perfect fit for Diatryma, a flightless bird that stood as tall as Shaquille O'Neal and weighed 350 pounds or more. Then two experts examined the track and declared it a fake.

It was shelved away in a state storehouse and forgotten by almost everybody ?except Patterson, a Maple Valley inventor, engineer and rockhound whose persistence paid off this fall when a world authority on prehistoric footprints said he's convinced the track is genuine.

"All my experience suggested to me that this was not a fake," said Martin Lockley, whose Dinosaur Trackers Research Group at the University of Colorado has collected and studied thousands of fossil footprints from around the globe. "This was a huge bird."

Lockley joined Patterson in arguing the fossil's authenticity in an article published recently in the paleontological journal Ichnos.

He estimates the footprint was made 45 million years ago, a time when Western Washington was a subtropical flood plain lush with tree-sized ferns and populated by dwarf hippos and horses the size of fox terriers.

The footlong track would be the first ever discovered from Diatryma (pronounced Di-uh-tri-mah), though Lockley says it may also have been made by an as-yet-unknown relative. It would also extend the known range for the big bird, which was previously thought to have lived only east of the Rocky Mountains.

And it would be an exciting discovery for a region that was under water during the reign of the dinosaurs and is today covered with dense vegetation and ancient layers of lava that make fossil hunting frustrating.

Real or not? "This is a really cool animal," said Thor Hansen, a marine paleontologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where the track is currently on display. "I lean toward believing it's real."

Not everyone agrees, including John Rensberger, the recently retired curator of vertebrate paleontology for the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

He examined the track 12 years ago and found several things fishy about it, including what he thought were chisel marks and scratches, and little indication that the sediments in the siltstone were compressed by the weight of a giant bird.

"There just wasn't any way to verify it was a track," Rensberger said. "There was a good probability that whatever it was, it was modified by people."



Such disagreements are common in science, but especially prevalent in paleontology. The field has long been marked by vicious feuds and rivalries.

Two of the earliest dinosaur hunters, Edward Cope and Charles Marsh, waged open war in the late 1800s, stealing fossils from each other's digs, sabotaging skeletons and ridiculing each other in print.

"You have to have a thick skin in this field," said George Mustoe, a research technician specializing in paleontology at Western. "What happened to John [Patterson] is that he got caught in the crossfire

sephia_liza

About twice the size of the previous record holder
By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse

Trilobites were very widely distributed. The creature, which dates from 445 million years ago, measures 72 centimetres in length. This is about twice the size of the previous record holder.

Trilobites are an extinct group of sea-dwelling arthropods (animals with an outer skeleton and jointed body and limbs) that are distantly related to crabs, scorpions and beetles.

They are probably the most common fossils of the Paleozoic Era (about 545-250 million years ago) and scientists use them to help date different layers of rock.

"A trilobite of this size really is an amazing discovery," said Dr Graham Young, a member of the team that discovered it.

Useful creatures

The specimen is an example of a previously unknown species, and was found by researchers studying ancient tropical coasts, of the Late Ordovician and Early Silurian geological periods (458-408 million years ago), in Manitoba, Canada.

When the fossil was unearthed, most of its segmented exoskeleton was missing and only the rear most portion of the tail shield was present.

Scientists realised just what a monster they had when they started to clean up the specimen. The fossil is now on display in the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature in Winnipeg.



Most trilobites are between 3 and 10 cm (1 - 4 inches) in length. The creatures evolved quickly and were widely distributed, making them useful tools to compare the ages of rock strata in different parts of the world.

Colder climates

"There is nothing familiar about this particular specimen! It is an important and amazing find," says Manitoba Museum's Dr Bob Elias.

The fossil is now on display to the public. Dr Graham Young said: "We have found a very unusual specimen that illustrates some of the diversity and weirdness of ancient life. A trilobite of this size really is an amazing discovery."

In July 1998, a team of scientists set out for northern Manitoba hoping to find fossils similar to those uncovered by previous digs, like the 43-cm (17-inch) long trilobite excavated in the area a decade before.

The team struck lucky just outside their original search area. The trilobite's size contradicts the idea that larger animals are more commonly associated with colder climates.

Although northern Manitoba is now sub-arctic, hundreds of millions of years ago it would have been submerged in salty seawater located on the equator.

All images courtesy of the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature

sephia_liza

James Owen in London
for National Geographic News
October 6, 2004

Saber-toothed cats, mastodons, giant sloths, woolly rhinos, and many other big, shaggy mammals are widely thought to have died out around the end of the last ice age, some 10,500 years ago.

More recently, however, evidence has emerged that at least two of the spectacular megafauna of the Pleistocene era (1.6 million to 10,000 years ago) clung on until recent times.

In the 1990s mammoth remains found on an island north of Arctic Siberia revealed the animals still roamed a tiny corner of the planet just 3,600 years ago. Tantalizingly, this was almost a thousand years after the first pyramids were built in ancient Egypt.

Now a new study, published tomorrow in the science journal Nature, suggests that another striking mammal, the Irish elk, likewise lived way beyond the last ice age.

The Irish elk is also known as the giant deer (Megaloceros giganteus). Analysis of ancient bones and teeth by scientists based in Britain and Russia show the huge herbivore survived until about 5,000 B.C.梞ore than three millennia later than previously believed.

The research team says this suggests additional factors, besides climate change, probably hastened the giant deer's eventual extinction. The factors could include hunting or habitat destruction by humans.

The Irish elk, so-called because its well-preserved remains are often found in lake sediments under peat bogs in Ireland, first appeared about 400,000 years ago in Europe and central Asia.

It stood 7 feet (2.1 meters) at the shoulder. Adult males had massive antlers that spanned 12 feet (3.7 meters) and weighed up to 88 pounds (40 kilos).

Through a combination of radiocarbon dating of skeletal remains and the mapping of locations where the remains were unearthed, the team shows the Irish elk was widespread across Europe before the last "big freeze." The deer's range later contracted to the Ural Mountains, in modern-day Russia, which separate Europe from Asia.

Last Stand in Siberia

The giant deer made its last stand in western Siberia, some 3,000 years after the ice sheets receded, said the study's co-author, Adrian Lister, professor of palaeobiology at University College London, England.

"The eastern foothills of the Urals became very densely forested about 8,000 years ago, which could have pushed them on to the plain," he said. He added that pollen analysis indicates the region then became very dry in response to further climactic change, leading to the loss of important food plants. "In combination with human pressures, this could have finally snuffed them out," Lister said.

Hunting by humans has often been put forward as a contributory cause of extinctions of the Pleistocene megafauna. The team, though, said their new date for the Irish elk's extinction hints at an additional human-made problem梙abitat destruction.

Lister said, "We haven't got just hunting 7,000 years ago梩his was also about the time the first neolithic people settled in the region. They were farmers who would have cleared the land."

The presence of humans may help explain why the Irish elk was unable to tough out the latest of many climatic fluctuations梡eriods it had survived in the past.

Meanwhile, Lister cast doubt on another possible explanation for the deer's demise梩he male's huge antlers. Some scientists have suggested this exaggerated feature梩he result of females preferring stags with the largest antlers, possibly because they advertised a male's fitness梒ontributed to the mammal's downfall.

They say such antlers would have been a serious inconvenience in the dense forests that spread northward after the last ice age.

But, Lister said, "That's a hard argument to make, because the deer previously survived perfectly well through wooded interglacials [warmer periods between ice ages]."

Moose Competition

He added, however, that the animal may have also suffered from increased competition from other species such as moose, which spread rapidly once the climate warmed. U.S. scientists from the University of Minnesota say the new study makes it clear that the reasons why so many Ice Age mammals went extinct are far more complex than previously realized.

Writing independently in tomorrow's Nature, biologists John Pastor and Ron Moen state: "The [Irish elk] finding lends weight to the idea that there is no one explanation for the so-called Pleistocene extinctions."

Alongside climate fluctuations and vegetation changes, they say, human activity, competing species, and other ecological pressures need to be taken into account for each animal.

Lister said, "Whereas people have been looking for single blanket explanation to account for all these species going extinct, we're saying you've got a range of species with different ecologies and adaptations."

So while the Irish elk preferred relatively temperate conditions and semi-woodland habitats, the woolly mammoth was adapted to cold temperatures and open tundra. "Past climate changes would have impacted on those two species differently," Lister added.

And if the mammoth and Irish elk both survived, what of the other shaggy megafauna that supposedly perished during the last ice age? The woolly rhinos and cave bears of Europe and Asia, the saber-toothed cats, the mastodons and giant sloths of North and South America梒ould some of these have made it through too?