Science Daily - Fossils

The Aztec skull whistle produces a shrill, screaming sound. A study shows that these whistles have a disturbing effect on the human brain. The Aztecs may have deliberately used this effect in sacrificial rituals.

The history of a major animal group, composed of millions of species of insects, arachnids, and nemotodes, has been elusive -- until now. A team has now identified the oldest known ecdysozoan in the fossil record and the only one from the Precambrian period.

Some of the first human beings to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, about 2,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Scholars for the first time identified chemical signatures of the components of a liquid concoction contained in a Bes mug. A new technique helped identify a sample flavored with honey, sesame seeds, pine nuts, licorice and grapes -- commonly used to make the beverage look like blood.

A 'one of a kind' fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate evolution.

Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered 'hominin' group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some of their genes via multiple, distinct interbreeding events that helped shape early human history. Scientists outline evidence suggesting that several Denisovan populations, who likely had an extensive geographical range from Siberia to Southeast Asia and from Oceania to South America, were adapted to distinct environments. They further outline a number of genes of Denisovan origin that gave modern day humans advantages in their different environments.

Extraordinarily well preserved fossils of feathered dinosaurs and other creatures got that way after being frozen in time by by volcanic eruptions, researchers have long suggested. Not so fast, says a new study.

Evolutionary biologists report they have analyzed a fossil of an extinct giant meat-eating bird -- which they say could be the largest known member of its kind -- providing new information about animal life in northern South America millions of years ago.

Research helps reconstruct an ancient climate and challenges the timing of the Andes Mountains uplift.

Ancient cultural burning practices carried out by Indigenous Australians limited fuel availability and prevented high intensity fires in southeastern Australia for thousands of years, according to new research.

A team discovered that, contrary to present scientific understanding, ancient volcanoes continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from deep within the Earth long past their period of eruptions.

Geneticists have deciphered the prehistory of aurochs -- the animals that were the focus of some of the most iconic early human art -- by analyzing 38 genomes harvested from bones dating across 50 millennia and stretching from Siberia to Britain. The aurochs roamed in Europe, Asia and Africa for hundreds of thousands of years. Adorned as paintings on many a cave wall, their domestication to create cattle gave us a harnessed source of muscle, meat and milk. Such was the influence of this domestication that today their descendants make up a third of the world's mammalian biomass.

Paleobiologists have found that the sinuses of ocean dwelling relatives of modern-day crocodiles prevented them from evolving into deep divers like whales and dolphins.

Paleontologists have identified fossils of an ancient species of bug that spent the past 450 million years covered in fool's gold in central New York. The new species, Lomankus edgecombei, is a distant relative of modern-day horseshoe crabs, scorpions, and spiders. It had no eyes, and its small front appendages were best suited for rooting around in dark ocean sediment, back when what is now New York state was covered by water.

Researchers reveal new insights into the complex evolutionary history behind the distinctive upright posture of modern placental and marsupial mammals, showing the transition was surprisingly complex and nonlinear, and occurred much later than previously believed.

A passage in the Norse Sverris Saga, the 800-year-old story of King Sverre Sigurdsson, describes a military raid that occurred in AD 1197, during which a body was thrown into a well at Sverresborg Castle, outside Trondheim in central Norway, likely as an attempt to poison the main water source for the local inhabitants. A new study describes how researchers used ancient DNA to corroborate the events of the saga and discover details about the 'Well-man,' blending history and archaeology with science and setting a precedent for future research on historical figures.

Fossils from more than 600,000 years ago reveal how Southern Europe's animal community shifted between warm and cold climate fluctuations, according to a new study.

The transition from water to land is one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth. Now, a team of roboticists, palaeontologists and biologists is using robots to study how the ancestors of modern land animals transitioned from swimming to walking, about 390 million years ago.

The new mammal lived in Colorado 70 to 75 million years ago -- a time when a vast inland sea covered large portions of the state, and animals like sharks, turtles and giant crocodiles abounded.

A research team has used nitrogen isotope analysis to demonstrate that 385 million years old corals from the Eifel and Sauerland regions had symbionts. This finding represents the earliest evidence of photosymbiosis in corals. Photosymbiosis might explain why ancient coral reefs grew to massive sizes despite being in nutrient-poor environments.