Paleontology

Homo gautengensis is, as of May 2010, the earliest recognized species in the genus Homo.

While earlier fossils belong to the genus Homo, none have yet been classified in any species.

Analysis announced in May 2010 of a partial skull found decades earlier in South Africa's Sterkfontein Caves near Johannesburg identified the species, named Homo gautengensis by anthropologist Dr Darren Curnoe of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

While earlier fossils belong to the genus Homo, none have yet been classified in any species.

The species' first remains were originally discovered in 1977 but had been left largely ignored.

They had been catalogued Stw 53 and were noted as being anomalous.

Identification of H. gautengensis was based on partial skulls, several jaws, teeth and other bones found at various times at the Caves.

It emerged over two million years ago and died out approximately six hundred thousand years years ago, and is believed to have arisen earlier than Homo habilis.

According to Curnoe, who led the research project, Homo gautengensis had big teeth suitable for chewing plant material.

It was "small-brained" and "large-toothed," and was "probably an ecological specialist, consuming more vegetable matter than Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and probably even Homo habilis."

It apparently produced and used stone tools and may even have made fire, as there is evidence for burnt animal bones associated with H. gautengensis' remains.

Curnoe and South African paleoanthropologist colleague Phillip Tobias believe H. gautengensis stood just over three feet tall and weighed about one hundred and ten pounds.

It walked on two feet when on the ground, "but probably spent considerable time in trees, perhaps feeding, sleeping and escaping predators," Curnoe said.

The researchers believe it lacked speech and language skills.

Due to its anatomy and geological age, researchers think that it was a close relative of Homo sapiens but not necessarily a direct ancestor.

Verus’ journey continues by ship through the Aegean and the southern coasts of Asia Minor, lingering in the famed pleasure resorts of Pamphylia and Cilicia, before arriving in Antioch.

It is not known how long Verus' journey east took; he might not have arrived in Antioch until after 162.

Statius Priscus, meanwhile, must have already arrived in Cappadocia; he will earn fame in 163 for successful generalship.

Lucius spends most of the campaign in Antioch, though he wintered at Laodicea and summers at Daphne, a resort just outside Antioch.

He takes up a mistress named Panthea, from Smyrna.

The biographer calls her a "lowborn girlfriend", but she is probably closer to Lucian's "woman of perfect beauty", more beautiful than any of Phidias and Praxiteles' statues.

Polite, caring, humble, she sings to the lyre perfectly and speaks clear Ionic Greek, spiced with Attic wit.

Panthea reads Lucian's first draft, and criticizes him for flattery.

He had compared her to a goddess, which frightens her—she does not want to become the next Cassiopeia.

She has power, too: she makes Lucius shave his beard for her.

Critics declaim Lucius' luxurious lifestyle.

He has taken to gambling and enjoys the company of actors.

He makes a special request for dispatches from Rome, to keep him updated on how his chariot teams are doing.

He brings a golden statue of the Greens' horse Volucer around with him, as a token of his team spirit.

Fronto defends his pupil against some of these claims: the Roman people need Lucius' bread and circuses to keep them in check.

This, at least, is how the biographer has it.

The whole section of the vita dealing with Lucius' debaucheries (HA Verus 4.4–6.6) is an insertion into a narrative otherwise entirely cribbed from an earlier source.

Some few passages seem genuine; others take and elaborate something from the original.

The rest is by the biographer himself, relying on nothing better than his own imagination.

Lucius faces a heavy task.

Fronto describes the scene in terms recalling Corbulo's arrival one hundred years before.

The Syrian soldiers, having turned soft during the east's long peace, spend more time at the city's open-air bars than in their quarters.

Under Lucius, training is stepped up.

Pontius Laelianus orders that their saddles be stripped of their padding.

Gambling and drinking are sternly policed.

Fronto writes that Lucius was on foot at the head of his army as often as on horseback.

He personally inspects soldiers in the field and at camp, including the sick bay.

Lucius sends Fronto few messages at the beginning of the war, but does send Fronto a letter apologizing for his silence.

He will not detail plans that could change within a day, he writes.

Moreover, there is little thus far to show for his work.

Lucius does not want Fronto to suffer the anxieties that have kept him up day and night.

One reason for Lucius' reticence may have been the collapse of Parthian negotiations after the Roman conquest of Armenia.

Lucius' presentation of terms is seen as cowardice.

The Parthians are not in the mood for peace.

Lucius needs to make extensive imports into Antioch, so he opens a sailing route up the Orontes.

Because the river breaks across a cliff before reaching the city, Lucius orders that a new canal be dug.

After the project is completed, the Orontes' old riverbed dries up, exposing massive bones—the bones of a giant.

Pausanias says they were from a beast "more than eleven cubits" tall; Philostratus says the it was "thirty cubits" tall.

The oracle at Claros declares that they are the bones of the river's spirit.

Avicenna continues to write compendious works, producing a notable philosophical encyclopedia and numerous works on medicine.

The Book of Healing (Arabic: Kitab Al-Shifaʾ, Latin: Sufficientia) is a scientific and philosophical encyclopedia.

Despite its English title, it is not concerned with medicine.

Also called The Cure, it is intended to "cure" or "heal" ignorance of the soul.

He probably began to compose the al-Shifa in 1014, completed it around 1020, and published it in 1027.

The book is divided into four parts: logic, natural sciences, mathematics (a quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music), and metaphysics.

It is influenced by ancient Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, Hellenistic thinkers such as Ptolemy, earlier Persian and Muslim scientists and philosophers such as Al-Kindi (Alkindus), Al-Farabi (Alfarabi) and Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī.

The book proposes the theory that Venus is closer to Earth than the Sun.

Ibn Sina's theory on the formation of metals combines Jābir ibn Hayyān's sulfur-mercury theory from Islamic alchemy (although he was a critic of alchemy) with the mineralogical theories of Aristotle and Theophrastus.

He creates a synthesis of ideas concerning the nature of the mineral and metallic states.

Avicenna suggests a hypothesis about the origin of mountain ranges, and contributes to paleontology with his explanation of how the stoniness of fossils was caused.

Aristotle previously explained it in terms of vaporous exhalations, which Ibn Sina modified into the theory of petrifying fluids (succus lapidificatus).

Avicenna discusses the mind, its existence, the mind and body relationship, sensation, perception, etc.

He writes that at the most common level, the influence of the mind on the body can be seen in voluntary movements, in that the body obeys whenever the mind wishes to move the body.

He further writes that the second level of influence of the mind on the body is from emotions and the will.

He also writes that strong negative emotions can have a negative effect on the vegetative functions of an individual and may even lead to death in some cases.

Avicenna also gives psychological explanations for certain somatic illnesses, and he always links the physical and psychological illnesses together.

A well-preserved mammoth, frozen many thousands of years before, is found in Siberia in 1400.

Conrad Gessner describes all the known animals of his era and is believed to be the first scientist to publish illustrations of fossils.

The Swiss physician and naturalist writes a manuscript in 1545 entitled Bibliotheca Universalis, which contains summaries of all the known books in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier, known as Georges Cuvier, was born in Montbéliard, France, where his Protestant ancestors had lived since the time of the Reformation.

His father, Jean George Cuvier, was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guards and a bourgeois of the town of Montbéliard; his mother was Anne Clémence Chatel.

At the time, the town, which was annexed to France on October 10, 1793, had belonged to the Duchy of Württemberg.

His mother, who was much younger than his father, had tutored him diligently throughout his early years so that he easily surpassed the other children at school.

During his gymnasium years, he had little trouble acquiring Latin and Greek, and was always at the head of his class in mathematics, history, and geography.

Soon after entering the gymnasium, at age ten, he had encountered a copy of Conrad Gesner's Historiae Animalium, the work that first sparked his interest in natural history.

He then began frequent visits to the home of a relation where he could borrow volumes of Buffon's massive Histoire Naturelle.

All of these he read and reread.

He remained at the gymnasium for four years, then spent an additional four years at the Caroline Academy in Stuttgart, where he excelled in all of his coursework.

Although he knew no German on his arrival, after only nine months study he managed to win the school prize for that language.

Upon graduation, he had no money to await appointment to academic office, so in July 1788 he took a job at Fiquainville chateau in Normandy as tutor to the only son of the Comte d'Héricy, a Protestant noble.

It was here during the early 1790s that he began his comparisons of fossils with extant forms.

Cuvier regularly attended meetings held at the nearby town of Valmont for the discussion of agricultural topics.

There, he became acquainted with Henri Alexandre Tessier (1741–1837), a physician and well-known agronomist who had fled the Terror in Paris and assumed a false identity.

After hearing Tessier speak on agricultural matters, Cuvier recognized him as the author of certain articles on agriculture in the Encyclopédie Méthodique and addressed him as M. Tessier.

Tessier replied in dismay, "I am known, then, and consequently lost."

— " Lost!" replied M. Cuvier; "no; you are henceforth the object of our most anxious care."

"They soon became intimate and Tessier introduced Cuvier to his colleagues in Paris — "I have just found a pearl in the dunghill of Normandy", he wrote his friend Antoine-Augustin Parmentier.

As a result, Cuvier entered into correspondence with several leading naturalists of the day and was invited to Paris.

Arriving in the spring of 1795, at the age of twenty-six, he soon became the assistant of Jean-Claude Mertrud (1728–1802), who had been appointed to the newly created chair of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes.

The Institut de France was founded in the same year, and he was elected a member of its Academy of Sciences.

In 1796, he begins to lecture at the École Centrale du Pantheon, and at the opening of the National Institute in April, he reads his first paleontological paper, which will subsequently be published in 1800 under the title Mémoires sur les espèces d'éléphants vivants et fossiles.

In this paper, he analyzes skeletal remains of Indian and African elephants as well as mammoth fossils, and a fossil skeleton known at that time as the 'Ohio animal'.

Cuvier's analysis establishes, for the first time, the fact that African and Indian elephants are different species and that mammoths are not the same species as either African or Indian elephants and therefore must be extinct.

He further states that the 'Ohio animal' represents a distinct extinct species that is even more different from living elephants than mammoths are.

Years later, in 1806, he will return to the 'Ohio animal' in another paper and give it the name Mastodon.

In his second paper in the year 1796, he describes and analyzes a large skeleton found in Paraguay, which he names Megatherium.

He concludes that this skeleton represents yet another extinct animal and, by comparing its skull with living species of tree dwelling sloths, that it is a kind of ground dwelling giant sloth.

Together these two 1796 papers are a landmark event in the history of paleontology and in the development of comparative anatomy as well.

They also greatly enhance Cuvier's personal reputation, and they essentially end what had been a long running debate about the reality of extinction.

Georges Cuvier had in 1800 been the first to correctly identify in print, working only from a drawing, a fossil found in Bavaria as a small flying reptile, which he named the Ptero-Dactyle in 1809 (later Latinized as Pterodactylus antiquus)—the first known member of the diverse order of pterosaurs.

In 1808, Cuvier had identified a fossil found in Maastricht as a giant marine lizard, which he named Mosasaurus, the first known mosasaur.

Cuvier speculated that there had been a time when reptiles rather than mammals had been the dominant fauna.

This speculation will be confirmed over the next two decades by a series of spectacular finds.

Cuvier has collaborated for several years with Alexandre Brongniart, an instructor at the École de Mines (Mining School) in Paris, to produce a monograph on the geology of the region around Paris.

They had published a preliminary version in 1808 and the final version is published in 1811.

In this monograph, they identify characteristic fossils of different rock layers that they use to analyze the geological column, the ordered layers of sedimentary rock, of the Paris basin.

They conclude that the layers had been laid down over an extended period during which there clearly had been faunal succession and that the area had been submerged under sea water at times and at other times under fresh water.

Along with William Smith's work during the same period on a geological map of England, which also used characteristic fossils and the principle of faunal succession to correlate layers of sedimentary rock, the monograph helps establish the scientific discipline of stratigraphy.

It is a major development in the history of paleontology and the history of geology.

Cuvier has come to believe that most if not all the animal fossils he has examined are remains of species that were now extinct.

Near the end of his 1796 paper on living and fossil elephants, he wrote: All of these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe.

This has led Cuvier to become an active proponent of the geological school of thought called catastrophism, which maintains that many of the geological features of the earth and the history of life could be explained by catastrophic events that had caused the extinction of many species of animals.

Over the course of his career, Cuvier will come to believe that there had not been a single catastrophe but several, resulting in a succession of different faunas.

He writes about these ideas many times; in particular, he discusses them in great detail in the preliminary discourse (introduction) to a collection of his papers, Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (Researches on quadruped fossil bones), on quadruped fossils published in 1812.

The 'Preliminary Discourse' becomes very well known, and unauthorized (and in the case of English not entirely accurate) translations are made into English, German and Italian.

Apart from his own original investigations in zoology and paleontology Cuvier has carried out a vast amount of work as perpetual secretary of the National Institute, and as an official connected with public education generally; and much of this work appears ultimately in a published form.

Thus, in 1808 he had been placed by Napoleon upon the council of the Imperial University, and in this capacity he presides (in the years 1809, 1811 and 1813) over commissions charged to examine the state of the higher educational establishments in the districts beyond the Alps and the Rhine which had been annexed to France, and to report upon the means by which these could be affiliated with the central university.

Three separate reports on this subject are published by him.

In his capacity, again, of perpetual secretary of the Institute, he not only prepares a number of éloges historiques on deceased members of the Academy of Sciences, but he is the author of a number of reports on the history of the physical and natural sciences, the most important of these being the Rapport historique sur le progrès des sciences physiques depuis 1789, published in 1810.

Georges Cuvier has founded the science of paleontology.

The belief that no species of animal had ever become extinct was still widely held when Cuvier presented his paper on living and fossil elephants in 1796.

Authorities such as Buffon had claimed that fossils found in Europe of animals such as the woolly rhinoceros and mammoth were remains of animals still living in the tropics (i.e., rhinoceroses and elephants), which had shifted out of Europe and Asia as the earth became cooler.

Cuvier's early work had demonstrated conclusively that this was not the case.

None of Cuvier's many works attain a higher reputation than his Le Règne Animal, the first edition of which appears in four octavo volumes in 1817.

Fossil collecting had been in vogue in the late eighteenth century and early nneteenth century, at first as a pastime akin to stamp collecting.

It is gradually transforming into a science as the importance of fossils to geology and biology becomes understood.

Mary Anning of Lyme Regis caters to the commercial side of the field, selling her finds.

She had soon forged relationships within the scientific community, whose passion for fossils has grown to be a major source of income for her.

The cause of this connection had been one of Anning's first discoveries, the skeleton of an ichthyosaur, in 1811.

Her next major discovery had been a real first, the first-ever skeleton of a plesiosaur in 1821.

In 1828, she discovers an important fossil of a pterosaur, the first found outside Germany and thought to be the first complete skeleton.

Though these three finds are what make her mark on history, Anning is to continue collecting for the remainder of her life, making numerous other contributions to early paleontology.