* Astronomy

Efforts to preserve evolutionary history should focus on the most vulnerable lineages
Global calamities like the one that doomed most dinosaurs forever alter the varieties of life found on Earth, but new research by a team of researchers at the University of Chicago and elsewhere shows that it doesnt take a catastrophe to end entire lineages. An analysis of 200 million years of history for marine clams found that vulnerability to extinction runs in evolutionary families, even when the losses result from ongoing, background rates of extinction.

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Gettysburg storms expose more ancient bones
Waves of storms that have pummelled the area during the past several weeks have exposed more early dinosaur age bones at the only known fossil site that has ever been found within Gettysburg Borough.
Several slabs of dense sandstone containing the bones of a giant amphibian that lived about 215 million years ago in a large stream that ran through what would one day become Gettysburg were recovered last week, along with a four-inch jaw section.

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The World's Richest and Most Extensive Marine Bone Deposit
In the famed Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed near Bakersfield, California, shark teeth as big as a hand and weighing a pound each, intermixed with copious bones from extinct seals and whales, seem to tell of a 15-million-year-old killing ground.
Yet, new research by a team of palaeontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and the University of Utah paints a less catastrophic picture. Instead of a sudden die-off, the researchers say that the bone bed is a 700,000-year record of normal life and death, kept free of sediment by unusual climatic conditions between 15 million and 16 million years ago.
The team's interpretation of the fossils and the geology to establish the origins of the bone bed, the richest and most extensive marine deposit of bones in the world, are presented in the June 2009 issue of the journal Geology.

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In a coastal bay fronting an ancient sea where Bakersfield now stands, the waters once swarmed with giant 40-foot sharks, ancestral seals larger than any known today, and the ancestors of countless other marine animals long extinct.
That was 15 million years ago, but evidence of their existence lies in a priceless layer of fossils where a team of scientists working from the University of California at Berkeley has discovered clues telling how that fantastic fossil-rich site known as Sharktooth Hill formed in the water and was exposed to the surface much, much later.

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