Around 13,200 years ago, a roving male mastodon died in a bloody mating-season battle with a rival in what today is northeast Indiana, nearly 100 miles from his home territory, according to the first study to document the annual migration of an individual animal from an extinct species. A mounted skeleton of the Buesching mastodon,…
While wildfires over recent years have raged across much of the western United States and pose significant hazards to wildlife and local populations, wildfires have been a long-standing part of Earth’s systems without the influence of humans for hundreds of millions of years. Reflected light microscope image of a 430-million-year-old charred Prototaxites from a borehole drilled…
Research led by palaeontologists at the University of Southampton has identified the remains of one of Europe’s largest ever land-based hunters: a dinosaur that measured over 10m long and lived around 125 million years ago. Illustration of White Rock spinosaurid [Credit: UoS/A Hutchings] Several prehistoric bones, uncovered on the Isle of Wight, on the south…
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A group of researchers from CONICET and the University of Utah demonstrated that during the time of the first dinosaurs, variations in the diversity and abundance of the plant and vertebrate animal species cannot be related to the climatic changes recorded throughout its deposition, in contrast with previous hypotheses. Artist’s reconstruction of the Triassic ecosystem…
Read More “Previous hypotheses questioned in origin of dinosaurs in Argentina” »
The Evolutionary Morphology Laboratory led by Shigeru Kuratani at the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) in Japan, along with collaborators, has found evidence that the mysterious ancient fish-like vertebrate Palaeospondylus was likely one of the earliest ancestors of four-limbed animals, including humans. Published in the scientific journal Palaeospondylus as reconstructed by synchrotron radiation x-ray…
Proteins extracted from fragments of prehistoric eggshell found in the Australian sands confirm that the continent’s earliest humans consumed the eggs of a two-metre tall bird that disappeared into extinction over 47,000 years ago. The only almost complete Genyornis eggshell ever found. Located by N. Spooner, collected by G Miller, South Australia. Four puncture holes on…
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For decades, paleontologists have debated whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. Knowing whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded could give us hints about how active they were and what their everyday lives were like, but the methods to determine their warm- or cold-bloodedness — how quickly their…
Unusually well-preserved reef corals from the Geological and Paleontological Collection at Leipzig University hold a great secret: They allow us to travel far into the past and reconstruct climatic conditions in our latitudes. Researchers from Leipzig University, the Universities of Bremen and Greifswald, and UniLaSalle in Beauvais have now succeeded in doing just this. Using…
An international team of scientists from UCL (University College London), the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Natural History Museum (London) and the University of Florence have found a remarkable type of fossilisation that has remained almost entirely overlooked until now. The images show the impressions of a collapsed cell-wall covering (a coccosphere) on the surface…
Read More “Discovery of ‘ghost’ fossils reveals plankton resilience to past global warming events” »
What links a finger bone and some fossil teeth found in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos? The answer to this question has been established by an international team of researchers from Laos, Europe, the US and…
Read More “Ancient tooth unlocks mystery of Denisovans in Asia” »
