all Charles R. Marshall stories

First orchid fossil puts showy blooms at some 80 million years old

50443248 — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 16:27:21 -0400

Biologists at Harvard University have identified the ancient fossilized remains of a pollen-bearing bee as the first hint of orchids in the fossil record, a find they say suggests orchids are old enough to have coexisted with dinosaurs.

Their analysis, published this week (Aug. 29) in the journal Nature, indicates orchids arose some 76 to 84 million years ago, much longer ago than many scientists had estimated. The extinct bee they studied, preserved in amber with a mass of orchid pollen on its back, represents some of the only direct evidence of pollination in the fossil record.

When fish first started biting

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:20:30 -0400

Before fish began to invade land, about 365 million years ago, they had some big problems to solve. They needed to come up with new ways to move, breathe, and eat.

Take the latter, for example. Fish usually pucker up and suck prey into their mouths. But air is 900 times less dense than water, so land-livers must bite into their food to get a meal. Researchers at Harvard University have just completed a study that gives a clear picture of how that change was made.

What killed the dinosaurs?

70652986 — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 05:11:13 -0400

Charles Marshall's childhood passion led him to a career in paleontology, trying to understand the interplay between inheritance, environment, and catastrophe in directing evolution. Marshall's work attracted media attention in 1996. He and University of Washington geologist Peter Ward concluded there may have been other causes than just the well-publicized comet or asteroid impact responsible for the extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous Period, when all living dinosaur species died out. Marshall used a statistical analysis of the fossil record to conclude that a major drop in sea level – preceding the impact by 150,000 to 300,000 years – may have led to as much as 25 percent of the huge number of extinctions that took place.