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4+ hour, 10+ min ago (930+ words) Climbers found ancient footprints on Italy's cliffs. Scientists say they show a panicked turtle rush during an earthquake, preserved for 80 million years. (CREDIT: Cretaceous Research) In the spring of 2019, free climbers scaling the risky cliffs of Monte C'nero on Italy's Adriatic coast noticed something that stopped them cold. High on pale slabs of limestone that tilt toward the sea, the rock was pocked with strange, curved shapes. They looked like footprints. Hundreds of them. Those images soon reached a fellow climber trained in geology. He returned with a research partner and a drone. From above, the full picture emerged. One slab alone measured about 10 by 20 meters and held an ocean of impressions. Most curved southwest. Some looked like shallow bowls. Others resembled the sweep of flippers through soft mud. Back in the lab, scientists from the Norwegian University of Science…...

5+ hour, 11+ min ago (1122+ words) For more than 2,000 years, people have watched chameleon eyes swivel around and wondered how they pull it off without twisting their necks. Now high-resolution scans have finally revealed the secret: each eye is wired to the brain by a long, tightly coiled nerve that acts like extra cable hidden inside the skull. Those spiral cables let the eyes sweep across almost the whole surroundings while the head stays nearly still, a huge advantage for an animal that hunts from narrow branches." The discovery comes from a team working with preserved specimens in natural history museums, and it shows that chameleons solved a vision problem in a way no other known vertebrate has. Chameleons have long fascinated biologists because their eyes seem to move on their own, scanning for insects and danger at the same time." The work was led by…...

6+ hour, 31+ min ago (169+ words) Paleontologists have discovered 18,000 dinosaur tracks along an ancient coastline located in Torotoro National Park in Bolivia. The footprints and swim tracks were made between 145 million and 66 million years ago. Most are from theropods that walked as bipeds. Paleontologists have discovered 18,000 dinosaur tracks along an ancient coastline located in Torotoro National Park in Bolivia. The footprints and swim tracks were made between 145 million and 66 million years ago. Most are from theropods that walked as bipeds. Posted by retort at 01:45 PM | 0 COMMENTS | permalink | Comment on This Entry | Read the Retort using RSS. Admin's note: Participants in this discussion must follow the site's moderation policy. Profanity will be filtered. Abusive conduct is not allowed. The following HTML tags are allowed in comments: a href, b, i, p, br, ul, ol, li and blockquote. Others will be stripped out. Participants in this discussion must…...

11+ hour, 6+ min ago (1107+ words) When a small set of ancient foot bones turned up in Ethiopia years ago, the fossils raised more questions than answers. The pieces were odd enough to stand out from anything scientists had seen from that time period. They looked old, even by human evolution standards, and they hinted at a way of walking that did not match the familiar pattern linked to early ancestors. The bones sat in that curious space for a while, waiting for more evidence to make sense of them. Those clues finally clicked into place. The foot, about 3.4 million years old, has now been matched to a species separate from the famous Australopithecus afarensis, best known from the fossil called Lucy. This confirms that two different kinds of ancient hominins lived side by side in the same region. Until now, scientists were not entirely sure…...

11+ hour, 22+ min ago (478+ words) New findings suggest that complex life began forming much earlier, and over a far longer period, than researchers previously understood. The study provides fresh insight into the environmental conditions that supported early evolution and challenges several widely accepted ideas about when advanced cellular features first appeared. Led by the University of Bristol and published in Nature on December 3, the work shows that complex organisms started developing long before oxygen levels in the atmosphere rose to significant levels. Until now, many scientists believed that plentiful oxygen was essential for the emergence of complex life. "The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, with the first microbial life forms appearing over 4 billion years ago. These organisms consisted of two groups -- bacteria and the distinct but related archaea, collectively known as prokaryotes," said co-author Anja Spang from the Department of Microbiology & Biogeochemistry at the…...

11+ hour, 37+ min ago (417+ words) Trending News: New research reveals ancient anacondas were as big as today's giants....

12+ hour, 51+ min ago (852+ words) A new fossil mega catalog from the Omo-Turkana Basin in East Africa pulls together 1,231 ancient bones and teeth.That single basin now holds roughly one in three hominins, humans and their closest fossil relatives, found from that slice of African prehistory. For decades, early members of our own genus, Homo, seemed strangely scarce in this region around 2 million years ago. The new catalog shows that Homo was never really missing, just split among separate reports and buried inside an uneven fossil record. Along the border of Kenya and Ethiopia, the Omo-Turkana Basin lies where the Omo River drains into Lake Turkana, preserving fossil-rich sediments. The work was led by Fran'ois Marchal, a paleoanthropologist at Aix-Marseille University, and his research focuses on fossil records. In that basin, fossils span roughly 4.2 to 1.5 million years, with only two major gaps where sediments hold…...

16+ hour, 48+ min ago (437+ words) Trending News: Lizards possess a remarkable survival strategy where their tails detach and continue to wriggle, distracting predators and allowing the lizard to esca...

22+ hour, 7+ min ago (548+ words) Learn how a unique combination of anatomical traits and CT-scan data led researchers to classify Chromeornis as a new dinosaur species " and reconstruct the behavior behind its unusual death. In the early Cretaceous, a palm-sized bird made a fatal mistake. Its fossil shows a tight mass of tiny stones jammed in its throat " a snapshot of a creature caught in its final moments. The cluster includes more than 800 rocks, far more than any known bird uses for digestion, and packed so high in the throat that scientists say the animal likely choked. The fossil belongs to Chromeornis funkyi, a newly identified dinosaur species described in Palaeontologica Electronica that offers a window into early-bird evolution. CT scans showed its throat stones weren't used for digestion, suggesting the fossil preserves an unusual moment that hints at the quirks and vulnerabilities of this…...

23+ hour, 48+ min ago (583+ words) The tracks indicate how many animals were traveling via the ancient coastline. 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…...