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News
Why it might be time to rethink the human family tree
3+ hour, 33+ min ago (882+ words) Humanity’s family tree is long and tangled. Scientists sort our ancient relatives into three familiar groups: Homo, Australopithecus and Paranthropus. Each of these is a “genus”, the rank just above a species. (In Homo sapiens, Homo is the genus and…...
Crocodiles can’t fly. Birds can. Scientists have finally figured out why
4+ day, 20+ hour ago (709+ words) The closest living relatives of crocodiles and alligators are, perhaps surprisingly, birds. They are both archosauriforms, a group of species that originated about 250 million years ago near the beginning of the Triassic period. The group soon split into two lineages:…...
Dodos probably weren’t as stupid as historians made them out to be: new research
1+ week, 6+ day ago (432+ words) Dodo skull scans show the famously extinct birds were no less brainy than their surviving relatives – and may have roamed at dusk and dawn....
On the origin of feces: how animal poo drove Earth’s greatest evolutionary event
2+ week, 3+ hour ago (283+ words) Is the evolution of excrement the reason we exist?...
80-million-year-old snake fossil sheds light on why lizards lost their limbs and started slithering
3+ week, 6+ day ago (857+ words) Snakes are everywhere in our legends and mythology. Yet for most of us, our blood runs cold whenever we encounter these strangely undulating, scaly tubes of muscle slithering through the leaf litter. The loss of an arm or leg poses…...
Storms that built a graveyard: ancient monsoons created a spectacular dinosaur fossil site
3+ week, 6+ day ago (763+ words) Around 80 million years ago, a stretch of tropical coastline in what is now north-eastern Italy was lashed by monsoon rains and tropical cyclones. Those storms swept dinosaur carcasses, crocodiles, plants and river mud onto a tidal flat, where the tides…...
Cacti spines, snake fangs, snail love darts – oh my! How function drives the evolution of nature’s puncture tools
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (669+ words) Most people probably aren’t thinking about the complexity of nature when they get stung by a bee or prick their thumb on a rose. They are probably just thinking, “Ouch, that hurts!” Even at this level of interaction, however, it…...
Spider fangs are one of their scariest features – new fossils reveal their origins
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (478+ words) The publicity posters for the 1955 cult monster movie Tarantula! displayed a giant spider rampaging across the Arizona desert and clutching a poor human victim in its viciously long fangs. The film captured our fear of spiders, their creepy crawly motion…...
We checked 2000 museum specimens and discovered a tiny new ‘ferocious’ Australian mammal
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (816+ words) Australia is home to unusual mammals not found anywhere else – consider the platypus, Tasmanian devil or the red kangaroo. But did you know our understanding of this continent’s incredible mammalian diversity is still incomplete? We have discovered a new species…...
Microbes destroyed an ancient pterosaur’s wingbone, then preserved it for 100 million years
2+ mon, 3+ hour ago (421+ words) What a prehistoric flying reptile’s bone reveals about its diet – and the future of fossil science....