The DNA of the extinct Aepyornis has been extracted from ancient eggshells.

“Researchers have tried unsuccessfully to isolate DNA from a fossil eggshell for years,” said Charlotte Oskam at Murdoch University in Western Australia, who authored the research.

“It just turned out that they were using a method designed for bone that was not suitable for a fossil eggshell.”

The team has obtained DNA from the shells of a variety of species, most notably the elephant bird Aepyornis , which at half a tonne was heaviest bird to have ever existed.

Aepyornis looked like an outsized ostrich, standing three metres tall; most of them died out 1,000 years ago.

Archaeologist Mike Parker Pearson at the University of Sheffield hopes that an analysis of the bird’s DNA will shed more light on why the bird became extinct.

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Another great list from Cracked.com…

#2 Carcharodon/Carcharocles megalodon, The Giant Shark

The largest fish in the ocean today (that we know about) is the whale shark, and while the name is certainly impressive, the animal itself is more like the Fat Albert of the sea, benevolently swimming along and wrecking havoc on precisely nothing it encounters.

Much more impressive was Carcharodon megalodon, the largest bony fish in history and the star of more made-for-cable movies than Lorenzo Lamas and Casper Van Dien combined. At 70-feet long, this magnificent bastard was more than three times the size of an average great white shark and large enough to swallow an average sedan.

Why it’s a Good Thing They’re Dead:

We shouldn’t really have to explain this. Between great whites, moray eels and 160-foot long Voltron-jellyfish already in the ocean, it’s scary enough to go swimming without a beast from the Old Testament sniffing around for your blood.

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A dinosaur-like creature has been found which is 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs. [Thx Tron]

Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period – about 245 million years ago.

The scientists say that its age suggests that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.

They described their findings in the journal Nature.

The study was led by Dr Sterling Nesbitt from the University of Texas at Austin in the US.

He said: “This new evidence suggests that [dinosaurs] were really only one of several large and distinct groups of animals that exploded in diversity in the Triassic period, including silesaurs [like this one], pterosaurs, and several groups of crocodilian relatives.”

Dr Randall Irmis from the Utah Museum of Natural History in the US was also involved in the study. He said that this group of creatures – the silesaurs – were the “closest relative of the dinosaurs”.

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The world’s first pterosaur tracks from Japan suggest that pterodactyls coexisted with birds 127 million years ago.

For the latest study, accepted for publication in the journal Cretaceous Research, Lee and his colleagues focused on the pterosaur tracks. The scientists identified a total of 64 imprints made by five to six individuals that “show a clear quadrupedal gait pattern” with feet bearing curved “hook-like sharp” claws.

“The high density of the tracks suggest gregarious behavior, but the random orientation of the trackways does not show that they were moving in the same direction as a herd,” Lee said.

He and his team instead think the pterosaurs and birds randomly gathered to feed. The eating marks consist of “small round depressions on the slab,” possibly where the animals repeatedly pecked away for food.

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The fossilized remains of a 10m-long predatory shark has been unearthed in Kansas.

Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago.

The bottom-dwelling predator had huge tooth plates, which it likely used to crush large shelled animals such as giant clams.

Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new specimen suggests it was far bigger than previously thought.

The scientists who made the discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other newly discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for more than 100 million years.

But this new fish, called Ptychodus mortoni, is both bigger and more fierce, having a taste for flesh rather than plankton.

It may even have been the largest shellfish-eating animal ever to have roamed the Earth.

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