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News
Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) Is Older Than We Thought
3+ hour, 26+ min ago (395+ words) Scientists have pushed back LUCA’s origin by hundreds of millions of years. Life on Earth had to begin somewhere, and scientists think that “somewhere” is LUCA—or the Last Universal Common Ancestor. True to its name, this prokaryote-like organism represents…...
Strange Holes in Ancient Sloth Bones May Rewrite Human History
5+ day, 1+ hour ago (282+ words) The objects suggest that humans entered South America thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Figuring out when exactly humans first reached South America increasingly depends on how you—read the bones of a giant ground sloth? The most provocative…...
Animals Keep Evolving Into Crabs, Which Is Somewhat Disturbing
1+ mon, 4+ day ago (553+ words) It’s okay if this weirds you out. Evolution has a crab problem. Over time, several crustacean lineages have arrived at a broad, low, crab-like body even when they didn’t begin as true crabs. Scientists call that pattern “carcinization,” and we’ve…...
This Tiny, Apelike Human Relative Could Rewrite the History of Our Species
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (1147+ words) While doing fieldwork on Indonesia’s Flores Island in the early 2000s, anthropologist Gregory Forth, PhD, frequently spoke to the locals living in the mountains. They told him that they sometimes caught glimpses of a small humanoid animal, a kind of “ape-man,…...
All Life on Earth Can Be Traced Back to One Common Ancestor | The Astounding Pop Mech Show | Episode 01
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (80+ words) Popular Mechanics All Life on Earth Can Be Traced Back to One Common Ancestor | The Astounding Pop Mech Show | Episode 01 Pop Mech Explains Space Concepts The Pop Mech Longevity Course Pop Mech Explains Precognition A Part of Hearst Digital Media…...
She Was Half Ape, Half Human—and She May Hold the Secret to What Makes Us Who We Are
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (421+ words) In this 4.4-million-year-old skeleton, scientists may have found the missing step between climbing and walking. A 4.4-million-year-old female skeleton named Ardi may answer that question. Predating even the iconic Lucy by a million years, she belongs to the species Ardipithecus…...
A Student Discovered His Father’s Lost Notebooks—and Unlocked a 55-Million-Year-Old Fossil Mystery
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (20+ words) A mummified fossil fish was forgotten in a university basement until a son's chance discovery brought it back to science....
Construction Workers Dug Beneath a High School—and Stumbled Upon 200+ Ancient Species
2+ mon, 1+ week ago (566+ words) “It’s the entire ecosystem from an age that’s gone.” Most high schoolers only get to study fossils through textbooks, videos, and the occasional museum field trip. Students at San Pedro High School in Los Angeles got the stranger version: in…...
Scientists Discovered Remains of the Earliest Animals on Earth. They May Have Made a Big Mistake.
2+ mon, 2+ week ago (246+ words) They looked like traces left behind by tiny creatures, but were most likely microbes. Strange forms of life emerged during the Ediacaran period. Creatures such as the flat, soft-bodied Dickinsonia and wormlike Spriggina (which crept along ancient seafloors) became some…...
A Scientist Says Humans Were Meant to Live So Much Longer—Then the Dinosaurs Ruined It
3+ mon, 1+ week ago (30+ words) A microbiologist named João Pedro de Magalhães proposed the idea that the reign of dinosaurs forced mammals to speed up their reproductive cycle, eliminating key longevity genes. de Magalhães posits......