Testosterone in tusks: Hormones in mammoth fossils excite paleontologists
The technique could allow us to link mammoth health and nutrition to mating. Enlarge / Mammoth tusks collected at Wrangel Island, where some of the samples tested for hormones originated. (credit: Alexei Tikhonov) Musth,.....»»
Paleobionics: A 450 million-year-old organism finds new life in softbotics
Researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with paleontologists from Spain and Poland, have used fossil evidence to engineer a soft robotic replica of pleurocystitid, a marine organism that.....»»
Fossils tell tale of last primate to inhabit North America before humans
The story of Ekgmowechashala, the final primate to inhabit North America before Homo sapiens or Clovis people, reads like a spaghetti Western: A grizzled and mysterious loner, against the odds, ekes out an existence on the American Plains......»»
Oldest known samples of brittle stars from supercontinent Gondwana discovered in South Africa
A small team of paleontologists with members from Rhodes University, in South Africa, the National Museum of Natural History, Luxembourg City, and the University of Oxford, in the U.K., has discovered the oldest known brittle star samples from the su.....»»
Bizarre new fossils shed light on ancient plankton
A scientist from the University of Leicester has discovered a new type of fossil that reveals life in the oceans half a billion years ago. The tiny organisms, detailed in a new study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Scien.....»»
A new versatile tool for studying fish hormones may transform fish farming
Dr. Itamar Harel, along with Ph.D. student Eitan Moses and postdoctoral researcher Dr. Roman Franek, all from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has introduced an innovative platform for controlling peptide hormones in fish, providing a fast and eff.....»»
The first Miocene fossils from coastal woodlands in the southern East African Rift
An international team, with participation by the Geochronology and Geology Program of the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has published a paper in the journal iScience on the first Miocene mammal fossils found i.....»»
Fossilized bat skull adds vital piece to evolution puzzle
Of all the mammals, bats have one of the poorest fossil records, with paleontologists estimating that about 80% of it is missing......»»
New look at a Lorrainosaurus in a museum finds plesiosaurs evolved earlier than thought
A team of paleontologists from Naturkunde-Museum Bielefeld, Adenauerplatz, the Polish Academy of Sciences, Natural History Museum Luxembourg and The Museum of Evolution at Uppsala University has found through study of a Lorrainosaurus fossil residing.....»»
New South American site reveals extraordinary fossils from the end of the age of the dinosaurs
The discovery of a spectacular fossil site in Argentina is helping shed new light on life at the end of the Cretaceous, the time period just before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct......»»
Boom in "ice ivory" trade of mammoth tusks presents new threat to elephants and environment
Conservationists fear a rise in the buying and selling of mammoth tusks, known as the "ice ivory" trade, poses a new threat to elephants......»»
What tiny fossils can tell us about the changing climate
Adriane Lam's research allows scientists to more accurately predict future climate and zoological changes as the Earth continues to warm......»»
Examining size growth of marine crocodiles in the Jurassic period
The State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart has a globally important collection of marine reptiles with numerous specimens from the time of the so-called Posidonia Shale. The outstanding feature of the ca. 183-182 million year old fossils from sout.....»»
Race to find world"s oldest mammal fossils led to academic warfare in the 1970s
The hunt for the world's most ancient mammals descended into academic warfare in the 1970s, researchers from the University of Bristol have discovered......»»
Long-term lizard study challenges the rules of evolutionary biology
Charles Darwin said that evolution was constantly happening, causing animals to adapt for survival. But many of his contemporaries disagreed. If evolution is always causing things to change, they asked, then how is it that two fossils from the same s.....»»
Fossil snake traces: Another world-first find on South Africa"s Cape south coast
Snakes are familiar, distinctive—and often feared—reptiles. And they've been around for a long time: body fossils found in the UK, Portugal and the US stretch all the way back to the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago......»»
Paleontologists find first molecular evidence of ginger pigment molecules in fossil frogs
Paleontologists at University College Cork (UCC) have found the first molecular evidence of pheomelanin, the pigment that produces ginger coloration, in the fossil record......»»
Feather-tailed possums in New Guinea were originally Aussies, according to fossil study
Analysis of Riversleigh fossils has revealed fascinating new facts about a tiny possum's ancestors. Scientists have long known that the miniature feather-tailed possums in Australia and the island of New Guinea—members of the marsupial family Acrob.....»»
New path for early human migrations through a once-lush Arabia contradicts a single "out of Africa" origin
Our species, Homo sapiens, migrated out of Africa multiple times—reaching the Levant and Arabia between 130,000 and 70,000 years ago, as exemplified by human fossils and archaeological sites found at various locations......»»
Ancient plant wax reveals how global warming affects methane in Arctic lakes
By studying fossils from ancient aquatic plants, Northwestern University and University of Wyoming (UW) researchers are gaining a better understanding of how methane produced in Arctic lakes might affect—and be affected by—climate change......»»
Recent manipulations of excitons in moiré superlattices
Light can excite electron and hole pairs inside semiconducting materials. If the attraction between a negatively charged electron and a positively charged hole (the antiparticle of electron in solid state physics) is strong, they stay bound together,.....»»