An extremely large bear skull (dated to about 1,300 years ago) found in 2014 on a beach in Alaska could belong to a giant type of polar bear described in legends by Arctic people as distinct from and bigger than modern polar bears.
New Fossil Crabs From British Columbia and Oregon
Homolid crabs (known as “porter crabs” or “carrier crabs” ) are long-legged, deep water crabs that get their common name from carrying sponges, corals, and even urchins on the back of their carapace using a special pair of legs, a behavior thought to be a defense or camouflage against predators. Their fossils have been rare from the West Coast. A new paper names describes a new genus of homolid crab (Cretalamoha) from the Pender Formation on Vancouver Island in British Columbia and a new species (Paromola roseburgensis) from the early Eocene Roseburg Formation in Oregon. Another fossil homolid crab named Homola vancouverensis was found in the Eocene Hoko River Formation of Washington State and described in 2001.
Torrey Nyborg and Alessandro Garassino (2017) New Occurrences of Fossil Homolidae from the Eastern Pacific. Boletín de la Sociedad Geológica Mexicana 69(1): 135 ‒ 148
http://boletinsgm.igeolcu.unam.mx/bsgm/vols/epoca04/6901/%286%29Nyborg.pdf
Evidence Claimed of Humans in Yukon in Canada as Early as 24,000 Years Ago
The DNA evidence from Kennewick Man and from other even more ancient human remains adds support to a theory that a genetically distinct human population developed in the Bering Strait region on an exposed land area called Beringia that connected Siberia and Alaska when sea levels where lower during the Ice Ages. Read More →
Kennewick Man Reburied by Local Northwest Tribes
On February 17, 2017, members of Northwest tribes came to the Burke Museum and took the remains of Kennewick Man, which had been stored at the museum since 1998. The next day (February 18), the tribal members reburied the “Ancient One,” as he was called, in a ceremony at an undisclosed spot on the Columbia Plateau. This brings a formal end to a long legal and cultural dispute that brought scientists, the federal government, and tribal peoples into conflict over the 9,000-year-old human remains found along the Columbia River in 1996. Read More →