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4+ hour ago (477+ words) Check out a record-breaking tracksite in Bolivia that can tell us if dinosaurs walked, ran, or swam and where they traveled. All of the tracks belong to three-toed theropods, a group of bipedal dinosaurs best known for including top predators like T. rex. But these Bolivian trackmakers came in all sizes. Some footprints measure less than four inches long, while others exceed a foot in length, hinting at a mix specimen passing through the area. Even more impressive than the sheer number of tracks is what they reveal about dinosaur behavior. The fossilized footprints record animals running, making sharp turns, dragging their tails, and in some cases, moving through water. But how do scientists extract this level of detail from simple footprints? Prehistoric footprints and members of the research team at the Cp1 (Carreras Pampa) site. (Image Courtesy of Ra'l Esperante) The…...

12+ hour ago (494+ words) Ancient genomes from southern Africa show that people evolved in isolation for upward of 100,000 years. Humans were isolated in southern Africa for about 100,000 years, which caused them to "fall outside the range of genetic variation" seen in modern-day people, a new genetic study reveals. The finding supports the idea that "modern" Homo sapiens can have many different combinations of genetic features, even those outside the norm. The team then compared the skeletons' genomes with published data from ancient and modern-day Africans, Europeans, Asians, Americans and Oceanians. The researchers discovered that all of the people who lived in southern Africa more than 1,400 years ago had dramatically different genetic makeups than modern-day humans, pointing to the relative isolation of the southern part of the continent until relatively recently. The researchers still aren't sure exactly why humans remained isolated in the region for…...

19+ hour, 34+ min ago (532+ words) We're looking forward to introducing you to Dinos . Check out our conversation below. Hi Dinos , thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us. I think our readers are in for a real treat. There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for open We're looking forward to introducing you to Dinos Check out our conversation below Hi Dinos , thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us I think our readers are in for a real treat There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for opening up with us Let's get into it: Are you walking a path'or wandering?Probably a little bit of both I think for an individual is almost…...

1+ day, 1+ hour ago (375+ words) The snakes stayed large and thrived even when cooling temperatures and shrinking habitats killed off other giant reptiles millions of years ago. Anacondas have been giant for millions of years, a new study finds. During the Middle and Upper Miocene (12.4 million to 5.3 million years ago), warm temperatures, expansive wetlands and abundant food enabled many animal species to grow much larger than their modern relatives. But few of these giant animals have survived to the present day. "Other species like giant crocodiles and giant turtles have gone extinct since the Miocene, probably due to cooling global temperatures and shrinking habitats," study co-author Andr's Alfonso-Rojas, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. "But the giant anacondas have survived " they are super-resilient." To estimate how big ancient anacondas might have been, Alfonso-Rojas and his colleagues measured 183 fossilized anaconda…...

1+ day, 1+ hour ago (375+ words) The snakes stayed large and thrived even when cooling temperatures and shrinking habitats killed off other giant reptiles millions of years ago. Anacondas have been giant for millions of years, a new study finds. During the Middle and Upper Miocene (12.4 million to 5.3 million years ago), warm temperatures, expansive wetlands and abundant food enabled many animal species to grow much larger than their modern relatives. But few of these giant animals have survived to the present day. "Other species like giant crocodiles and giant turtles have gone extinct since the Miocene, probably due to cooling global temperatures and shrinking habitats," study co-author Andr's Alfonso-Rojas, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. "But the giant anacondas have survived " they are super-resilient." To estimate how big ancient anacondas might have been, Alfonso-Rojas and his colleagues measured 183 fossilized anaconda…...

1+ day, 2+ hour ago (559+ words) Anacondas are among the largest living snakes in the world. They are usually 4 to 5 m long and in rare cases can reach 7 m. In new research, paleontologists analyzed giant anaconda fossils from South America to deduce that these tropical snakes reached their maximum size 12.4 million years ago and have remained giants ever since. The green anaconda (Eunectes murinus). Image credit: MKAMPIS / CC BY-SA 4.0. "Living snakes have a wide range of body lengths, with a modal size of 1 m and a range from 10 cm in the smallest leptotyphlopid thread snakes to approximately 7 m in the anaconda genus Eunectes and giant pythonids," said University of Cambridge Ph.D. student Andr's Alfonso-Rojas and colleagues. "Within Eunectes, the green anaconda (Eunectes murinus) is the largest species, with an average body size of 4-5 m in length and verifiable maxima between 6 and 7.2 m." "The evolutionary history of anacondas can…...

1+ day, 2+ hour ago (635+ words) New research suggests that "early human pioneers" in Australia interbred with archaic species of hobbits at least 60,000 years ago "Experts have long debated the date that humans arrived in Australia," said LiveScience. Now a study using DNA from both ancient and modern Aboriginal people across Oceania may have finally "settled the debate". The study, published last week in Science Advances, looked at an "unprecedentedly large" dataset of nearly 2,500 genomes to determine that humans began to settle northern Australia about 60,000 years ago. But "even more interestingly", the study also added to growing evidence that along the way these "early human pioneers likely interbred with archaic humans", including the species known as "the hobbit", Homo floresiensis. Homo floresiensis "might have been slight in stature", at just over a metre tall, but its origins have "attracted lengthy debate", said the Natural History Museum....

1+ day, 4+ hour ago (369+ words) While other species downsized and died out across millennia the anaconda remains an Amazon giant. The Green Anaconda is the heaviest snake on Earth today. For decades, many paleontologists suspected that the snake started out smaller and grew over the years. A new Cambridge study says otherwise. The team of paleontologists has unearthed fossils from the Urumaco and Socorro formations in Venezuela that tell a different story: Anacondas were giants over 12 million year ago. These animals were specialists of their time, growing huge to exploit the rich resources of the Pebas wetland. But as the Andes Mountains continued their slow, grinding uplift, they changed the continent's drainage. The massive wetlands drained, eventually forming the modern Amazon and Orinoco river basins. This transition was catastrophic for the giants. As the Pebas system vanished, so did the mega-caimans and the colossal turtles....

1+ day, 5+ hour ago (638+ words) What appeared to be tentacles washed up on an Aberdeenshire beach are the remains of a deep-sea creature called a seven-arm octopus, say experts. A local member of the public spotted the arms with rows of suckers at Forvie National Nature Reserve at Collieston, near Ellon, on Sunday and alerted reserve staff. Some detective work has led to the animal being identified as one of the world's largest species of octopus. Also known as a septopus, giant gelatinous octopus or blob octopus, they have eight arms like other octopus - but in males one of the arms is also a reproductive organ that they attach to females when mating. Marine biologist Dr Lauren Smith, of East Grampian Coastal Partnership, said seven-arm octopus were a "remarkable and rarely documented" species. They live hundreds of metres below the surface of the sea and…...

1+ day, 6+ hour ago (333+ words) It's an unprecedented look into prehistoric anatomy. We know what fossils look like. For example, typical dinosaur fossils are bones turned to stone and preserved from the passage of time located, if we're particularly lucky, in large collections that can be reassembled to represent the beast they used to prop up in their entirety. Now, not all fossils are like that. Some are just impressions of small creatures or animals left in rocks, but most have something in common'it's just the hard stuff left behind. With the exception of those found in environments particularly adept at preservation, the soft tissues degrade over time and all we're left with is stony bone. But not always. Sometimes we get lucky'like a team did when it located a fossil of a 520-million-year-old worm larva that still had its brain and guts intact. "It's…...