Billions of Years Before the Dinosaurs, Strange Creatures Inhabited In Earth

The evolutionary history of life on Planet Earth continues to be traced, how organisms live and their emergence. Earth formed about 4.5 Ga (billion years), it is estimated that there will be life on its surface within a billion years afterward. 

The existence of similarities with organisms living in the present era, indicates a common ancestor, which later evolved in length. More than 99% of all species, or more than five billion species, that have ever lived on earth are estimated to have become extinct. Current estimates of the number of Earth's species range from 10 – 14 million species, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and more than 86% have not been described. 

A discovery that is not good for the fate of mankind. In addition, this discovery also states that the search for inter-planetary life will be more complex than we imagined. The discovery itself was made by a group of academics from the University of Washington (UW) in Seattle led by Michael Kipp, as reported by the Itech Post. "The recognition of an interval in Earth's past, an era when Earth may have had different oxygen levels, and also very different living creatures, could mean that the detection of oxygen-rich distant planets is not necessarily a prerequisite for the existence of microorganisms and the biosphere. complex," said Michael Kipp in a statement on the UW website. 

Planet Earth began the process of becoming an oxygen-rich planet about 800 million years ago. So far, experts have concluded that biologically complex creatures, breathing oxygen, emerged as the planet became richer with oxygen. Thus, it was concluded that the life of ancient animals was possible because of the increased oxygen levels in the atmosphere. However, there was an era when oxygen levels were much higher. This happened in the era before the appearance of the first dinosaurs. 

The Lomagundi Incident: The “Oxygen Disaster” 

Earth suddenly became a planet with an oxygen-rich atmosphere as a result of the so-called Lomagundi Event, also known as the “Oxygen Disaster” or the “Great Oxidation”. That is, when oxygen levels reached their highest point in the oceans between 2.3 billion and 2.1 billion years ago, before dropping again for less certain reasons. The Lomagundi incident could have provided an opportunity for 'strange' creatures to evolve over billions of years into the 'ancestor' of today's creatures. However, oxygen levels then drop again, and the various creatures are then also wiped out. This can illustrate that perhaps, the fate of mankind will experience the same thing.

To determine oxygen levels during the Lomagundi Event, Kipp and his team plan to analyze selenium in rocks that formed at the bottom of the ocean during the Lomagundi Event. Selenium is released when rocks in the soil are eroded in the presence of ox
ygen and metabolized by microbes in the ocean.

The large numbers in the Lomagundi rocks suggest that the amount of organic carbon buried in the deep sea suddenly spiked, as written in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).

source : here

Stone-Age skeletons found In Sahara desert

Archaeologists have uncovered 20 Stone-Age skeletons in and around a rock shelter in Libya's Sahara desert, according to a new study. Skeletons dating back between 8,000 and 4,200 years have been discovered in the desert in Libya. Archaeologists believe that the site was a burial ground used for 4,000 years and must have maintained long-term significance with the local people. 20 skeletons were uncovered in total, 15 of which were buried around 8,000 years ago and a further five around 4,200 years ago underneath large stone heaps. At the time of these burials the Sahara was more temperate than it is now with seasonal green patches and support for animal herding. "It must have been a place of memory," said study co-author Mary Anne Tafuri. "People throughout time have kept it, and they have buried their people, over and over, generation after generation.".

Source : unexplained-mysteries

Water detected in exoplanet's atmosphere

Astronomers have conducted the most detailed examination yet of a Jupiter-sized planet's atmosphere. Located 130 light years away, planet HR 8799c can be directly observed because it is large and located at a significant distance from its parent star. Using the Keck Observatory telescopes and instrumentation astronomers have been able to analyze the composition of the planet's atmosphere, revealing the presence of water vapor and carbon monoxide. "We have been able to observe this planet in unprecedented detail because of Keck Observatory’s advanced instrumentation, our ground-breaking observing and data processing techniques, and because of the nature of the planetary system," said lead author Quinn Konopack. It is hoped that the information will help scientists understand the processes behind the planet's formation.
(source : unexplained-mysteries )

World's oldest man (Walter Breuning) dies aged 114

Walter Breuning was born in 1896 and lived through two world wars and more than a century of history.

A railroad man for most of his working life Breuning started work in 1916, bought his first car in 1919 and retired in 1967 before returning to work again as the manager and secretary for the Shriners until the grand old age of 99. In the years before his death Breuning would sit outside the Rainbow Retirement Community in an armchair wearing a suit and tie next to a Guinness World Records certificate proclaiming him the world's oldest man.

' KOMPAS.com - Walter Breuning, the world’s oldest man and second-oldest person, has died in the US, aged 114. Breuning died of natural causes in a Montana hospital, said a spokeswoman for the retirement home where he lived. He was 26 days younger than Besse Cooper of Georgia, whom the Gerontology Research Group in Los Angeles lists as the world’s oldest person at 114.
In an interview with The Associated Press last autumn, Breuning attributed his longevity to eating just two meals a day, working as long as he could and always embracing change - especially death. ‘We’re all going to die. Some people are scared of dying. Never be afraid to die. Because you’re born to die,’ he said.

Breuning was born on September 21, 1896, in Minnesota and spent his early years in South Dakota. That first decade of the 1900s was literally a dark age for his family. They had no electricity or running water. A bath for young Walter would require his mother to fetch water from the well outside and heat it on the coal-burning stove. He lied about his age and got a job in Minnesota with the Great Northern Railway at 16. He moved to Montana two years later and remained a loyal railwayman for the rest of his life, working there for 50 years, marrying co-worker Agnes Twokey and travelling by aeroplane only once in his life. He earned $90 a month for working seven days a week at the beginning, an amount he said was a lot of money at that time. In 1919, he bought his first car, a $150 second-hand Ford. Breuning remembered driving around town and spooking the horses that still crowded the dirt streets of Great Falls.

‘We had more damn runaways back in those days,’ Breuning said. ‘Horses are just scared of cars.’ He and his wife bought property for $15 and planned to build a house but everything went belly up when the Depression struck. ‘Everybody got laid off in the ’30s,’ Breuning said.

‘Nobody had any money at all. In 1933, they built the civic centre over here. Sixty-five cents an hour, you know. That was the wage - big wage.' Breuning was able to hold on to his job, but he and Agnes never built their house. They sold the lot for $25, making a tidy $10 profit. It turned out to be the only time Breuning ever owned property - he was a renter for the rest of his life. Agnes died in 1957 after 35 years of marriage. The couple had no children and Breuning never remarried. In 1963 - the year the Beatles released their first album - Breuning decided it was time to retire at 67. But he stuck by his philosophy and kept working.

He became the manager and secretary for the freemasons organisation the Shriners, a position he held until he was 99. Breuning moved into the Rainbow Retirement Community in 1980, calling home a spare studio apartment with bare walls. He would spent his days in an armchair outside the retirement home director’s office in a suit and tie, sitting near a framed Guinness Book of Records certificate proclaiming him the world’s oldest man. He would eat breakfast and lunch and then retire to his room in the early afternoon. He would visit the doctor just twice a year for check-ups and the only medication he would take was aspirin, director Tina Bundtrock said.

With most of his relatives gone, Breuning said his real family was there in the Rainbow. He received letters from admirers from around the world and he kept up with world events. 'Everybody says your mind is the most important thing about your body. Your mind and your body. You keep both busy, and by God you’ll be here a long time,' he said. Breuning had not asked for a funeral, retirement home officials said, and requested that donations be given to the Shriners’ Children’s Travel Fund and the Scottish Rite Language Disorder Center in lieu of flowers.

source - here

Unexplained Lights: UFOs sighted over Chicago

Sightings of a series of lights moving across the sky over Chicago have hit the headlines this week.

Witnesses crowded on the streets to look skywards at around 8pm on Saturday to witness a series of orange blinking lights moving together overhead. No unusual weather conditions were reported at the time the incident occured.

'A strange group of lights moving together across the Chicago sky Saturday night has some residents there wondering if what they saw were UFOs.
One of those people, Nicole Dragozetich, caught the unexplained phenomenon on her cell phone video camera.

She said she was driving down 35th Street and Western on Chicago's South Side at approximately 8 p.m. Saturday when she noticed at least a dozen people stopped in their tracks, staring at the sky.

The video she shot shows a line of several lights seeming to fly together low in the nighttime sky. The lights were orange, and they all seemed to blink together.

At first they were traveling in a straight line, but then formed different patterns.

On the video voices of the people watching the lights can be heard saying, 'They came from Roswell,' and 'That's creepy. I want to know what it is.'

Mark Bishop, meteorologist ABC station WLC-TV in Chicago said there were no unusual weather occurrences in the area Saturday evening reported by the National Weather Service.'

source - here

Satanism surge adds to demand for exorcists

The Roman Catholic Church has warned that a rise in Satanism has produced a rise in demand for exorcists.

Blaming the trend on easy access to information about Devil-worshipping on the internet the Vatican is holding a six day conference on the topic in Rome this week aimed at scrutinising Satanism and highlighting its risks. "The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Satanism," says Carlo Climati who specialises in the dangers the practice poses to young people.

A surge in Satanism fuelled by the internet has led to a sharp rise in the demand for exorcists, the Roman Catholic Church has warned.

'The web has made it easier than ever before to access information on Devil-worshipping and the occult, experts said.

Exorcism is the subject of a six-day conference being held this week at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome, which is under the Vatican's authority.

"The internet makes it much easier than in the past to find information about Satanism," said Carlo Climati, a member of the university who specialises in the dangers posed to young people by Satanism.

"In just a few minutes you can contact Satanist groups and research occultism. The conference is not about how to become an exorcist. It's to share information about exorcism, Satanism and sects. It's to give help to families and priests. There is a particular risk for young people who are in difficulties or who are emotionally fragile," said Mr Climati.

The object of seminars was to scrutinise the phenomenon of Satanism with "seriousness and scientific rigour", avoiding a "superficial or sensational approach", he said.

The conference in Rome has brought together more than 60 Catholic clergy as well as doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, teachers and youth workers to discuss how to combat the dangers of Devil-worship.

Organisers say the rise of Satanism has been dangerously underestimated in recent years.

"There's been a revival," said Gabriele Nanni, a former exorcist and another speaker at the course.

In theory, any priest can perform an exorcism – a rite involving prayers to drive the Devil out of the person said to be possessed.

But Vatican officials said three years ago that parish priests should call in professional exorcists if they suspect one of their parishioners needs purging of evil.

An exorcist should be called when "the moral certainty has been reached that the person is possessed", said Father Nanni, a member of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

That could be indicated by radical and disturbing changes in the person's behaviour and voice, or an ability to garble in foreign languages or nonsensical gibberish.

While the number of genuine cases of possession by the Devil remained relatively small, "we must be on guard because occult and Satanist practices are spreading a great deal, in part with the help of the internet and new technologies that make it easier to access these rituals," he said.

The Vatican's chief exorcist claimed last year that the Devil lurked in the Vatican, the very heart of the Catholic Church.

Father Gabriele Amorth said people who are possessed by Satan vomit shards of glass and pieces of iron, scream, dribble and slobber, utter blasphemies and have to be physically restrained.

He claimed that the sex abuse scandals which have engulfed the Church in the US, Ireland, Germany and other countries, were proof that the anti-Christ was waging a war against the Holy See. He said Pope Benedict XVI believed "wholeheartedly" in the practice of exorcism.'

Source - here and here

Expert claims El Chupacabra mystery solved

Author Benjamin Radford believes El Chupacabra is but a left-over memory from a science fiction movie.

Managing editor of the journal The Skeptical Inquirer Radford is no stranger to unusual stories, he has managed to trace the first physical description of the creature to a sketch made by an eyewitness in 1995 which was made in the same year as the movie "Species" was released. The human/alien hybrid featured in the film he noticed was very similar indeed to the Chupacabra sketch.

'Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster rank as the top two best-known monsters in the world, but since its 1995 debut, El Chupacabra has made a Justin Bieber-like ascension to No. 3 on the charts. The relative newcomer to the monster world is the go-to culprit for weird livestock deaths and creates a massive media stir whenever it's "sighted.
' It even has a fan club on Facebook. That could all end, now that Benjamin Radford, author of several books on monsters and paranormal phenomena, managing editor of the journal The Skeptical Inquirer and LiveScience columnist, has released what he says to be definitive proof that El Chupacabra is not real; it's not even a hoax, he said, but rather a leftover memory of a science-fiction film. Stories of El Chupacabra first surfaced in March 1995 in Puerto Rico, Radford said, when dead, blood-drained goats began showing up (El Chupacabra translates to 'goat sucker').

That August, a newspaper printed an eyewitness description of a bipedal creature, 4 to 5 feet tall with spikes down its back, long, thin arms and legs, and an alienlike oblong head with red or black eyes. That depiction became associated with El Chupacabra, and it reports of similar creatures began popping up throughout the Caribbean, in Latin America, Mexico and Florida. The frenzy had died down slightly by 2000, but picked back up in 2004 when something began attacking livestock in Texas.

A farmer shot one of the offenders, and later more alleged El Chupacabra carcasses turned up. They looked nothing like the Puerto Rico original, though, and DNA tests later revealed that they were actually coyotes with a severe case of mange. On top of the sudden change in appearance—a hairless, snarly-looking four-legged creature is the popular depiction in Texas—these coyotes didn't even act like El Chupacabra.

'When you did a necropsy of the chickens and goats that they attacked, they all had normal blood levels," Radford told Life's Little Mysteries. 'They were not, in fact, vampirized.'

'By the mid-2000s, anything weird was being called El Chupacabra,' he said. 'Mangy coyotes. Dead raccoons. Even a dried fish in New Mexico, which looks nothing like El Chupacabra.'
And yet the myth continued to gain momentum, so Radford, who has researched El Chupacabra and other strange sightings around the world for years, decided to cut it off at the head and set off to Puerto Rico to trace the beast back to its fictional roots. (Disclosure: Radford is a contributing writer to Life's Little Mysteries and columnist for its sister site, LiveScience.) Mistaken identity Radford dug through every El Chupacabra mention and traced the physical description of the monster to a single event in the second week of August 1995, when a sketch from an eyewitness named Madelyne Tolentino ran in a Puerto Rican newspaper. Locals immediately tagged the alien-looking animal as El Chupacabra.

The creature, Radford noticed, shared a strong resemblance to the alien/human hybrid in the 1995 sci-fi thriller "Species." When he spoke to Tolentino, he asked her if the thing that she saw could have been inspired by the film. Indeed, she had seen the movie in the weeks prior to making her description.
'You can make a direct connection between the film hitting theaters, her seeing the creature in the film, seeing it in the street, making the report and entering the public conscious,' Radford said.

Soon after, reports of nearly identical creatures began appearing throughout Latin America. But these can be dismissed, Radford says, because they're all based on Tolentino's Hollywood-inspired monster.

'What I've tried to do is take the whole El Chupacabra enchilada and break it into small mysteries and then solve those mysteries,' Radford said. 'There's no place else for those mysteries to hide now. If I haven't solved every piece of it, then I don't know what I'm missing. It's all there.'

'That said, if next month or next year somebody finds El Chupacabra that's sucking blood from animals, I'm happy to eat my crow and add a chapter to the book.'

Source : here