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A research team headed by Tim White discovered in 1992 the first Ardipithecus ramidus fossils from the Afar Depression in the Middle Awash river valley of Ethiopia. More fragments, including mainly teeth, were recovered in the following years allowing the composition of 45 percent of the total skeleton.
The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, in the Late Miocene. The fossils were dated as 4.4 million years of age based on its interval between the volcanic strata of the Gaala Tuff Complex and the Daam Aatu Basaltic Tuff. Studies under way indicate the species lived in the woodlands and could climb on all fours along tree branches, but the development of their arms and legs indicates they didn’t spend much time in the trees. And they could walk upright, on two legs, when on the ground. In its 2 October 2009 issue, Science presents 11 papers, authored by a diverse international team, describing the early hominid species, Ardipithecus ramidus, and its environment. 
These 4.4 million year old hominid fossils sit within a critical early part of human evolution, and cast new and sometimes surprising light on the evolution of human limbs and locomotion, the habitats occupied by early hominids, and the nature of our last common ancestor with chimps.
During the Late Triassic (about 210 million years ago) large sauropodomorphs dominated terrestrial environments.
In Europe Plateosaurs were widespread as heavy, long-necked, long-tailed herbivores up to 8 meters long.
There is a complete skeleton of a plateosaurus on display in the dinosaurs museum at Frick in Switzerland. Dinosaurs were discovered at Frick in the 1980's and 1990's at the clay quarry Gruhalde in a formation called "Bunten Mergel" (varicolored marl). In Late Triassic times the area of todays northern Switzerland was a vast, desertlike lowland with a tropical climate. Frick is one of the most important places of plateosaurs discoveries in Europe. Source: Sauriermuseum Frick.
Read more about plateosaurs:
The Anchisaur-Plateosaur Empire
The Norian Age
Dinosaurier Funde gesichert – weitere Grabungen in Frick geplant
Check out the website offering the complete work of Charles Darwin online for free > Darwin Online.
The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online (or Darwin Online) began in 2002 to assemble in one scholarly website all of Darwin's published writings and unpublished papers. It does not cover his unpublished letters which were already the focus of the Correspondence of Charles Darwin.Darwin Online is the largest and most widely used Darwin resource ever created. More copies of Darwin's works have been downloaded from Darwin Online than were published in Darwin's lifetime or in the whole of the 19th century.The site contains over 74,000 pages of searchable text and 182,000 electronic images. It contains at least one exemplar of all known Darwin publications, reproduced to the highest scholarly standards, both as searchable text and electronic images of the originals. The majority of these have been edited and annotated here for the first time.
Swiss glaciers are melting away at an accelerating rate and many will vanish this century if climate projections are correct. The Rhone glacier has been a tourist attraction since the middle of the nineteenth century.
the edge 
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