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54+ min ago (646+ words) Oddly shaped conch shells found at Neolithic archaeological sites dating back 6,000 years could have served as technology for producing an extremely loud noise, scientists have discovered. The tests were simple " picking up the shells and blowing into them " but the results were startling: a deafening TOOOOOOT recorded at up to 111.5 decibels. That's about as loud as a car horn or chainsaw. This creative experimentation by archaeologists Miquel L'pez-Garcia and Margarita D'az-Andreu of the University of Barcelona in Spain suggests that the people who lived at the Catalonia sites where the shells were found may have used them as a long-distance signalling tool. The shells of large sea snails " conch shells " have been found at many archaeological sites, leading to speculation that they may have served some function, musical or otherwise. Experiments to produce sound using these ancient shells have shown…...

2+ hour, 16+ min ago (793+ words) WINONA, Minn. " It was a dinosaur that once roamed the Earth 66 million years ago, and now a big piece of it sits housed in a lab at Winona State University in one of the rarest and largest fossil discoveries in recent memory. It was called Edmontosaurus. And the duck-billed dinosaur was really big. From the tip of its snout to the end of its tail, it was as big as a city bus. And it lived alongside its contemporaries Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops and existed just before all the large dinosaurs were wiped out in a mass extinction. Its bones sticking out of the ground in the North Dakota badlands led Adam Schroeder, a 2013 WSU geoscience graduate, to one of paleontology's most fascinating fossil discoveries. Most discoveries involve single bones or pieces of bone. This one involved a major section…...

2+ hour, 16+ min ago (793+ words) WINONA, Minn. " It was a dinosaur that once roamed the Earth 66 million years ago, and now a big piece of it sits housed in a lab at Winona State University in one of the rarest and largest fossil discoveries in recent memory. It was called Edmontosaurus. And the duck-billed dinosaur was really big. From the tip of its snout to the end of its tail, it was as big as a city bus. And it lived alongside its contemporaries Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops and existed just before all the large dinosaurs were wiped out in a mass extinction. Its bones sticking out of the ground in the North Dakota badlands led Adam Schroeder, a 2013 WSU geoscience graduate, to one of paleontology's most fascinating fossil discoveries. Most discoveries involve single bones or pieces of bone. This one involved a major section…...

2+ hour, 38+ min ago (572+ words) (ABC NEWS) " Paleontologists have found tens of thousands of dinosaur tracks in South America, which offers evidence as to which species were traveling via an ancient coastline. A total of nearly 18,000 tracks " including 16,600 footprints as well as 1,378 swim tracks and several tail traces " have been located along the Carreras Pampa track site, an ancient coastline located in Torotoro National Park in central Bolivia, according to a paper published in the journal'PLOS One'on Wednesday. The ripple marks extend in a northwest-southeast direction, which probably indicate how the dinosaurs and other animals moved along the paleocoastline, according to the paper. Most of the tracks belong to theropods " a clade of dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period known for their bipedal mode of walking that includes the Tyrannosaurus rex, according to the study. Some of the preserved tracks, estimated to have been created between…...

4+ hour ago (734+ words) The Lord Howe stick insect (Dryococelus australis) was presumed extinct for decades. It was once abundant on Lord Howe Island, hence its name. It was so abundant, in fact, that local fishermen reportedly used them as bait. However, the species eventually vanished after a plague of ship-borne rats invaded the island in 1918. Although they were merely innocent stowaways on the supply ship S.S. Makambo, the rats still spread quickly. They preyed on native fauna, and they also drove D. australis (and many other endemic creatures) to local extinction. By the early 1930s, the species was considered extinct universally. Museum specimens collected in the late 19th century were considered the "last known" representatives of the species. For decades, no one had any reason to believe that the insect could have survived " and yet, somehow, it did. Regardless of the fact that there weren't many individuals, they…...

4+ hour, 16+ min ago (400+ words) A team of US and Bolivian researchers has revealed that the Carreras Pampa archaeological dig site in Bolivia's Torotoro National Park is the single largest dinosaur track site ever discovered. How many individual prints have to be at the site to nab to make that kind of claim? Try 18,000 individual prints preserved across what used to be the muddy shoreline of a shadow freshwater lake about 70 million years ago. According to research published in PLOS One, nearly all the tracks belong to theropods, the bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs that are cousins of today's birds. The site boasts an absurd 16,600 three-toed prints, plus almost 1,400 "swim tracks," where dinos apparently kicked along the lake bottom like giant dogs. The prints range from dainty 10-centimeter foot taps to massive 30-centimeter stomps. Most came from small to mid-sized theropods roughly human-height, pacing along the shore…...

4+ hour, 16+ min ago (400+ words) A team of US and Bolivian researchers has revealed that the Carreras Pampa archaeological dig site in Bolivia's Torotoro National Park is the single largest dinosaur track site ever discovered. How many individual prints have to be at the site to nab to make that kind of claim? Try 18,000 individual prints preserved across what used to be the muddy shoreline of a shadow freshwater lake about 70 million years ago. According to research published in PLOS One, nearly all the tracks belong to theropods, the bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs that are cousins of today's birds. The site boasts an absurd 16,600 three-toed prints, plus almost 1,400 "swim tracks," where dinos apparently kicked along the lake bottom like giant dogs. The prints range from dainty 10-centimeter foot taps to massive 30-centimeter stomps. Most came from small to mid-sized theropods roughly human-height, pacing along the shore…...

4+ hour, 23+ min ago (385+ words) A team of US and Bolivian researchers has revealed that the Carreras Pampa archaeological dig site in Bolivia's Torotoro National Park is the single largest dinosaur track site ever discovered. How many individual prints have to be at the site to nab to make that kind of claim? Try 18,000 individual prints preserved across what used to be the muddy shoreline of a shadow freshwater lake about 70 million years ago. According to research published in PLOS One, nearly all the tracks belong to theropods, the bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs that are cousins of today's birds. The site boasts an absurd 16,600 three-toed prints, plus almost 1,400 "swim tracks," where dinos apparently kicked along the lake bottom like giant dogs. The prints range from dainty 10-centimeter foot taps to massive 30-centimeter stomps. Most came from small to mid-sized theropods roughly human-height, pacing along the shore…...

6+ hour, 22+ min ago (731+ words) Using samples from caves and rock shelters along South Africa's coasts, scientists have analyzed the DNA of ancient hunter-gatherers. The records reveal a southern African lineage of Homo sapiens that sits at one of the deepest " and most distinct " edges of human genetic variation. The patterns in these genomes point back to a southern African population that split early from other humans roughly 300,000 years ago. Taken together, the results argue that this region acted as a long-lasting refuge where key traits for survival, thought, and endurance evolved. The work was led by geneticist Mattias Jakobsson at Uppsala University in Sweden. His team studies human evolutionary history using genomes, complete sets of DNA instructions in each cell. For this project, researchers sequenced ancient DNA preserved in bones and teeth for thousands of years. They assembled genomes from 28 individuals who lived between…...

6+ hour, 30+ min ago (803+ words) In the forests of central Colombia, a roughly 2-foot long, quill-covered mammal has finally been recognized as new. It is a tree-climbing porcupine now named Coendou vossi, long mistaken for a common relative that lives nearby. Colombia is famous for wildlife, yet many of its small mammals remain, in one researcher's words, "little studied. That gap in knowledge set the stage for the porcupine mystery in the country's central mountains. The work was led by H'ctor E. Ram'rez-Chaves, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Caldas in Colombia. His research focuses on mammalogy, the branch of biology that studies mammals. Looking through records, the team noticed that some specimens of porcupine species, considered to be widespread, inhabited only in a specific part of Colombia. Intrigued, they decided to study that population. The animal that emerged from this detective work…...