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1+ hour, 14+ min ago (138+ words) The well-preserved nasal passages of a Neandertal skeleton are as narrow as our own The exceptionally well-preserved nasal cavity of this over 130,000 year old Neandertal skull wasn't specially adapted for cold and is similar to that of Homo sapiens, a new study finds. Proof that Neandertals hadn't adapted to cold was right under their noses. "What we found is that, yes, Neandertals had bigger noses, but that the inner structure of their noses was not so different from our own," says paleoanthropologist Constantino Buzi of the University of Perugia in Italy. "They were simply larger, and worked more efficiently." C. Buzi et al. The first preserved nasal cavity in the human fossil record: The Neanderthal from Altamura. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online November 17, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2426309122...

3+ hour, 15+ min ago (831+ words) A prehistoric bird that lived and died 120 million years ago has presented forensic paleontologists with a baffling medical mystery. Somehow, it managed to die with more than 800 tiny pebbles in its throat " a situation that researchers think almost certainly caused its demise. But why was the sparrow-sized bird swallowing the stones in the first place? It's a discovery that raises some interesting questions about the diet, behavior, and physiology of prehistoric birds " especially since the mass of stones discovered in the esophagus of the newly discovered Chromeornis funkyi is unlike anything seen in modern birds. Related: Armour-Plated Dinosaur's Last Meal Found Beautifully Preserved, 110 Million Years Later "It's pretty rare to be able to know what caused the death of a specific individual in the fossil record," says paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor of the Field Museum in Chicago. "But even though we…...

3+ hour, 15+ min ago (606+ words) Published Dec 5, 2025 9:00 AM EST Fossils may reveal what type of animal died millions of years ago, but they rarely depict exactly how they perished. Even rarer are the examples that clearly showcase an animal's exact cause of death. In fact, a120-million-year-old bird specimen housed at China's Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature may be the only fossilized remains of its kind. "There are thousands of bird fossils at the Shandong Tianyu Museum, but on my last trip to visit their collections, this one really jumped out at me," Chicago's Field Museum associate curator of fossil reptiles Jingmai O'Connor said in a statement. "I immediately knew it was a new species." Although its physiology and large teeth resembled a larger bird known as Longipteryx, the mystery avian was only about as large as a present-day sparrow. And then there was also the…...

4+ hour ago (518+ words) While scaling the cliffs of Italy's Monte C'nero, a group of climbers stumbled upon something truly remarkable'fossilized traces. A group of climbers discovered fossilized traces in Italy that suggest ancient sea turtles experienced a massive panic. These unusual markings, embedded in limestone, have shed light on a mysterious moment in history, over 80 million years ago, when these creatures were likely spooked by an earthquake. The discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, showed that the markings were found on the steep cliffs near La Vela Beach, part of the Monte C'nero region on the eastern shore of Italy. These tracks, resembling a stampede of marine reptiles, were discovered by climbers in 2019. The climbers who made the discovery were scaling the rocky cliffs above La Vela Beach when they noticed the unusual traces in the limestone. These markings appeared similar to…...

4+ hour, 30+ min ago (562+ words) A remote desert plateau has revealed a stunning discovery hidden in plain sight'an ancient landscape frozen in time, where rare footprints stretch across windswept stone. Scientists uncover a vanished world captured in extraordinary detail, exposing secrets of creatures that once roamed the region. Unlike other fossil sites, which often display a mix of herbivores and carnivores, this 7,485-square-meter expanse contains exclusively carnivore prints. No sauropods. No duck-billed dinosaurs. Just wave after wave of footprints, ranging in size from less than 10 centimeters to more than 30, preserved in sediment dating to the Maastrichtian age, just before dinosaurs vanished from Earth. The findings, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, reveal an ancient convergence of predator species in a now-vanished lakeshore ecosystem. The Carreras Pampa site now stands as the largest dinosaur tracksite ever identified, eclipsing long-standing records from other continents. Researchers recorded…...

4+ hour, 56+ min ago (107+ words) In the Formose reaction, formaldehyde condenses into sugars while in the presence of water and mineral catalysts, such as phyllosilicates and carbonates that provide the calcium and magnesium needed to catalyze that reaction. Bennu is rich in both the precursor, formaldehyde, and the necessary minerals to supply the catalysts, making it an ideal laboratory for this sugar-producing reaction. NASA / Phys.org - Sugars, 'gum,' stardust found in NASA's asteroid Bennu samples Y. Furukawa et al. - Bio-essential sugars in samples from asteroid Bennu UT - OSIRIS-Rex Asteroid Mission Seeks to Search for Origin of Life Chemistry UT - OSIRIS-REx's Final Haul: 121.6 Grams from Asteroid Bennu...

5+ hour, 54+ min ago (274+ words) The silence of ancient landscapes holds many secrets. One such secret has emerged from southern Africa, where researchers say early humans lived in long isolation and developed unusual genetic patterns that differ greatly from people today. Why were these ancient Southern Africans so genetically distinct? Scientists found that people living there before about 1,400 years ago had very different genetic profiles. This suggested that the region stayed separate from wider human movements. The reasons for this long isolation remain unclear. Researchers named this unique pattern the ancient southern African ancestry component. They saw no strong evidence of outside mixing until about A.D. 550. These findings differ from earlier linguistic and archaeological theories suggesting ongoing contact between Africa's regions. Statistical modelling showed that the southern population stayed large until about 200,000 years ago. People may have moved north during favourable periods. The southern population began…...

6+ hour, 6+ min ago (423+ words) Ancient hunter-gatherers in southern Africa were among the earliest modern humans, with genetic roots tracing back 300,000 years. New genetic research reveals the unique biological adaptations of these groups. Findings offer insights into human evolution and migration patterns. According to the genetic, palaeo-anthropological and archaeological evidence, modern humans "Homo sapiens" originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago and then spread around the world. But the evolutionary process of exactly how, where and when this happened is debated. Africa has the greatest human genetic diversity and the hunter-gatherers of southern Africa represent some of the oldest known genetic lineages. They can therefore reveal more about where and when we originated as a species. After thousands of years of migration, modern African populations have a mixed genetic heritage. So their genomes are not very helpful for understanding our deep evolutionary history....

7+ hour, 15+ min ago (251+ words) Published 12:00 am Friday, December 5, 2025 Shows they evolved flight-ready brains in different ways from birds "The breakthrough was the discovery of an ancient pterosaur relative, a small lagerpetid archosaur named'Ixalerpeton'from 233-million-year-old Triassic rocks in Brazil," Mario Bronzati, an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the University of T'bingen in Germany and lead author of the study, said. "Then, using statistical analysis of the size and 3D shape of their cranial endocasts, we were able to map the stepwise changes in brain anatomy that accompanied the evolution of flight," said coauthor Akinobu Watanabe, associate professor of anatomy at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine. Likewise, the new analyses show that pterosaurs retained modest brain sizes. "While there are some similarities between pterosaurs and birds, their brains were actually quite different, especially in size," said coauthor Matteo Fabbri, assistant professor of…...

7+ hour, 26+ min ago (455+ words) The problem is that chemistry fades. Over billions of years, heat and pressure scramble these molecules until they look indistinguishable from abiotic carbon, the dead and non-living matter found in meteorites. For decades, this has been the fog of war for biologists. We know life existed three billion years ago, but the molecular proof is often debated or dismissed as contamination. In the past, scientists looked for specific biomarkers. These are single, intact molecules that scream life, such as cholesterol or chlorophyll. But those fragile molecules rarely survive billions of years of geological cooking. Instead of looking for a single needle in the haystack, the Carnegie team used machine learning to look at the geometry of the hay itself. They trained a type of machine-learning model called a random forest on these molecular fingerprints. The AI did not look for…...