Feast clue to smell of ancient Earth
Tiny 1,900 million-year-old fossils from rocks around Lake Superior, Canada, give the first ever snapshot of organisms eating each other and suggest what the ancient Earth would have smelled like.
View ArticleStudy explores 100 year increase in forestry diseases
As ash dieback disease continues to threaten common ash trees across Europe, new research in the Journal of Quaternary Science explores the historic impact of forest diseases to discover if diseases...
View ArticleTracing the evolution of avian wing digits
It is widely accepted that birds are a subgroup of dinosaurs, but there is an apparent conflict: modern birds have been thought to possess only the middle three fingers (digits II-III-IV) of an...
View ArticleDiscovery of a strange new snow scorpionfly species in Alaska helped by Facebook
Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (Derek Sikes and Jill Stockbridge) discovered a strange new insect on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska. It belongs to an enigmatic group that might...
View ArticleAnthropologists help solve mystery of 250 million-year-old strange bedfellows
(Phys.org) —They were strange bedfellows in a 250 million-year-old burrow: the sleeping, cat-size mammal forerunner Thrinaxodon liorhinus and the slightly smaller amphibian Broomistega putterilli that...
View Article'Steak-knife' teeth reveal ecology of oldest land predators
The first top predators to walk on land were not afraid to bite off more than they could chew, a University of Toronto Mississauga study has found.
View Article47 million year old bird fossil offers evidence of oldest known pollinator
(Phys.org) —A pair of researchers with Germany's Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt has found fossil evidence of a bird that lived approximately 47 million years ago...
View ArticleAmber discovery indicates Lyme disease is older than human race
Lyme disease is a stealthy, often misdiagnosed disease that was only recognized about 40 years ago, but new discoveries of ticks fossilized in amber show that the bacteria which cause it may have been...
View ArticleFootprints suggest tyrannosaurs were gregarious
Scientists in western Canada have discovered the fossilized footprints of three tyrannosaurs that suggest these fearsome predators may have hunted in packs.
View ArticleNew dinosaur species unearthed in Venezuela
(Phys.org) —A team of paleontologists with members from Brazil, Venezuela, the U.S. and Germany has found fossil evidence of a previously unknown dinosaur in Venezuela. In their paper published in the...
View ArticleNew ionoscopiform fish found from the Middle Triassic of Guizhou, China
The Ionoscopiformes are a fossil fish lineage of halecomorphs known only from the Mesozoic marine deposits. Because of their close relationships with the Amiiformes, the Ionoscopiformes are...
View ArticleEarliest-known arboreal and subterranean ancestral mammals discovered
The fossils of two interrelated ancestral mammals, newly discovered in China, suggest that the wide-ranging ecological diversity of modern mammals had a precedent more than 160 million years ago.
View ArticleNew carnivorous dinosaur from Madagascar raises more questions than it answers
The first new dinosaur named from Madagascar in nearly a decade, Dahalokely tokana was a carnivore measuring 9-14 feet long. Its fossils were found in 90-million-year-old rocks of northernmost...
View ArticleScientists date prehistoric bacterial invasion still present in today's cells
Long before plants and animals inhabited the earth, when life consisted of single-celled organisms afloat in a planet-wide sea, bacteria invaded these organisms and took up permanent residence. One...
View ArticlePigments, organelles persist in fossil feathers
A study provides multiple lines of new evidence that pigments and the microbodies that produce them can remain evident in a dinosaur fossil. In the journal Scientific Reports, an international team of...
View ArticleFactoring for cosmic radiation could help set a more accurate 'molecular clock'
Scientists long have used the "molecular clock" to establish when species may have branched from each other on the Tree of Life.
View ArticleFossils enrich our understanding of evolution
Our understanding of evolution can be enriched by adding fossil species to analyses of living animals, as shown by scientists from the University of Bristol.
View ArticleDiscovery shows dinosaurs may have been the original lovebirds
Dinosaurs engaged in mating behavior similar to modern birds, leaving the fossil evidence behind in 100 million year old rocks, according to new research by Martin Lockley, professor of geology at the...
View ArticleStudy gets an earful of how mammals developed hearing
An international study led by University of Queensland researchers has challenged a long-held idea about how mammals evolved more sensitive hearing than reptiles.
View ArticleGorilla fossil suggests split from humans as far back as 10 million years ago
(Phys.org)—An international team of researchers studying fossils unearthed in Ethiopia's Chorora Formation in the Afar rift has dated some gorilla teeth fossils to approximately 8 million years ago,...
View ArticleNew study confirms giant flightless bird wandered the Arctic 50 million years...
It's official: There really was a giant, flightless bird with a head the size of a horse's wandering about in the winter twilight of the high Arctic some 53 million years ago.
View ArticleAn ancient retrovirus has been found in human DNA – and it might still be active
Striking evidence has emerged that an ancient virus previously known only from fossil evidence has persistently infected some humans at very low levels for hundreds of thousands or even millions of...
View ArticlePaleontologists find first fossil monkey in North America—but how did it get...
Seven tiny teeth tell the story of an ancient monkey that made a 100-mile ocean crossing between North and South America into modern-day Panama - the first fossil evidence for the existence of monkeys...
View ArticleBeetles pollinated orchids millions of year ago, fossil evidence shows
When most people hear the word "pollinator," they think of bees and butterflies. However, certain beetles are known to pollinate plants as well, and new fossil evidence indicates that they were doing...
View ArticleMale or female? Scientists challenge evidence of sex differences among dinosaurs
A paleontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature is countering decades of studies that assert that some dinosaurs can be identified as male or female based on the shapes and sizes of their bones.
View ArticleGenetic evidence suggests that early mammals had good night-time vision,...
Our earliest mammalian ancestors likely skulked through the dark, using their powerful night-time vision to find food and avoid reptilian predators that hunted by day. This conclusion, published by...
View ArticleCretaceous tanaidaceans took care of their offspring more than 105 million...
A scientific team has found the first evidence of parental care in Tanaidaceans, dating back to more than 105 million years, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports, from...
View ArticleFossil evidence suggests humans played a role in monkey's demise in Jamaica
Radiocarbon dating of a fossilized leg bone from a Jamaican monkey called Xenothrix mcgregori suggests it may be the one of the most recent primate species anywhere in the world to become extinct, and...
View ArticleCan 'cli-fi' actually make a difference? A climate scientist's perspective
Climate change - or global warming - is a term we are all familiar with. The warming of the Earth's atmosphere due to the consumption of fossil fuels by human activity was predicted in the 19th...
View ArticleStudy of fossil remains on Sumba island reveals unique creature history
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from the U.K., Indonesia and Australia has found fossil evidence of several unique creatures that once lived on the Indonesian island of Sumba. In their paper published...
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