Roughly 80 million years ago in the shallow inland sea that once split North America into eastern and western land masses, a fearsome 10-meter-long (33-foot-long) marine reptile with powerful jaws and tremendous bite-force was one of the apex predators.
New bioarchaeology research from a University of Otago Ph.D. candidate has shown how infectious diseases may have spread 4000 years ago, while highlighting the dangers of letting such diseases run rife.
One day about 120,000 years ago, a few humans wandered along the shore of an ancient lake in what is now the Nefud Desert in Saudi Arabia. They may have paused for a drink of fresh water or to track herds of elephants, wild asses, and camels that were trampling the mudflats. Within hours of passing through, the humans’ and animals’ footprints dried out and eventually fossilized.
In the public imagination, the Vikings were closely-related clans of Scandinavians who marauded their way across Europe, but new genetic analysis paints a more complicated picture.
One of Germany’s most famous ancient artifacts may not be what it seems, if a new study is to be believed.
When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question.
For tens of thousands of years, a Neanderthal molar rested in a shallow grave on the floor of the Stajnia Cave in what is now Poland. For all that time, viable mitochondrial DNA remained locked inside – and now, finally, scientists are discovering its secrets.
Darwin would be delighted by the story his successors have revealed
A 13-million-year-old fossil unearthed in northern India comes from a newly discovered ape, the earliest known ancestor of the modern-day gibbon. The discovery by Christopher C. Gilbert, Hunter College, fills a major void in the ape fossil record and provides important new evidence about when the ancestors of today’s gibbon migrated to Asia from Africa.
Amid busy construction crews racing to build an airport in Mexico, scientists are unearthing more and more mammoth skeletons in what has quickly become one of the world’s biggest concentrations of the now-extinct relative of modern elephants.
