Science Daily - Fossils

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Paleontology and fossil records. Read about fossil finds over the last 10 years starting with the most recent research. Full text, photos.
Updated: 1 hour 9 min ago

Buried Alive: Carbon dioxide release from magma deep beneath ancient volcanoes was a hidden driver of Earth's past climate

Wed, 10/30/2024 - 14:06
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.
Categories: Fossils

Ancient DNA brings to life history of the iconic aurochs, whose tale is intertwined with climate change and human culture

Wed, 10/30/2024 - 13:58
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.
Categories: Fossils

Sinuses prevented prehistoric croc relatives from deep diving

Tue, 10/29/2024 - 19:30
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.
Categories: Fossils

Fossil hunters strike gold with new species

Tue, 10/29/2024 - 11:06
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.
Categories: Fossils

How mammals got their stride

Fri, 10/25/2024 - 13:16
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.
Categories: Fossils

'Well-man' thrown from castle identified from 800-year-old Norse saga

Fri, 10/25/2024 - 11:23
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.
Categories: Fossils

Fossils unveil how southern Europe's ecosystem changed through Glacial-Interglacial Stages

Wed, 10/23/2024 - 13:18
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.
Categories: Fossils

'Paleo-robots' to help scientists understand how fish started to walk on land

Wed, 10/23/2024 - 13:18
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.
Categories: Fossils

Paleontologists discover Colorado 'swamp dweller' that lived alongside dinosaurs

Wed, 10/23/2024 - 13:17
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.
Categories: Fossils

Symbiosis in ancient Corals

Wed, 10/23/2024 - 12:07
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.
Categories: Fossils

Rare fossils of extinct elephant document the earliest known instance of butchery in India

Mon, 10/21/2024 - 12:32
Scientists have discovered the earliest evidence of animal butchery by humans in India.
Categories: Fossils

Ancient viral DNA in the human genome linked to multiple sclerosis and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Mon, 10/21/2024 - 11:30
New research has revealed a connection between ancient viral DNA embedded in the human genome and the genetic risk for two major diseases that affect the central nervous system.
Categories: Fossils

Fossils and fires: Insights into early modern human activity in the jungles of Southeast Asia

Wed, 10/09/2024 - 23:21
Studying microscopic layers of dirt dug from the Tam Pa Ling cave site in northeastern Laos has provided a team of archaeologists further insights into some of the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens in mainland Southeast Asia. The site, which has been studied for the past 14 years, has produced some of the earliest fossil evidence of our direct ancestors in Southeast Asia but now a new study has reconstructed the ground conditions in the cave between 52,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Categories: Fossils

Newly discovered Late Cretaceous birds may have carried heavy prey like extant raptors

Wed, 10/09/2024 - 13:48
Newly discovered birds from Late Cretaceous North America were hawk-sized and had powerful raptor-like feet, according to a new study.
Categories: Fossils

New seed fossil sheds light on wind dispersal in plants

Tue, 10/08/2024 - 14:02
Scientists have discovered one of the earliest examples of a winged seed, granting insight into the origin and early evolution of wind dispersal strategies in plants.
Categories: Fossils

2-billion-year-old rock home to living microbes

Thu, 10/03/2024 - 11:35
Pockets of microbes have been found living within a sealed fracture in 2-billion-year-old rock. The rock was excavated from the Bushveld Igneous Complex in South Africa, an area known for its rich ore deposits. This is the oldest example of living microbes being found within ancient rock so far discovered. The team involved in the study built on its previous work to perfect a technique involving three types of imaging -- infrared spectroscopy, electron microscopy and fluorescent microscopy -- to confirm that the microbes were indigenous to the ancient core sample and not caused by contamination during the retrieval and study process. Research on these microbes could help us better understand the very early evolution of life, as well as the search for extraterrestrial life in similarly aged rock samples brought back from Mars.
Categories: Fossils

Study of monkey fossils found in cave sheds light on the animals' extinction centuries ago

Wed, 10/02/2024 - 12:52
By studying rare fossils of jaws and other skull parts of a long-extinct Caribbean monkey, a team of researchers says it has uncovered new evidence documenting the anatomy and ecology of an extinct primate once found on Hispaniola -- the Caribbean island on which Haiti and the Dominican Republic are located.
Categories: Fossils

Brazilian fossils reveal jaw-dropping discovery in mammal evolution

Wed, 09/25/2024 - 11:36
The discovery of new cynodont fossils from southern Brazil by a team of palaeontologists has led to a significant breakthrough in understanding the evolution of mammals.
Categories: Fossils

World's oldest cheese reveals origins of kefir

Wed, 09/25/2024 - 11:28
Scientists successfully extracted and analyzed DNA from ancient cheese samples found alongside the Tarim Basin mummies in China, dating back approximately 3,600 years. The research suggests a new origin for kefir cheese and sheds light on the evolution of probiotic bacteria.
Categories: Fossils

Unveiling ancient life: New method sheds light on early cellular and metabolic evolution

Tue, 09/24/2024 - 11:30
Analyzing fossils can be difficult -- especially when they're so small that they can only be seen with a microscope. Researchers have now come up with a solution.
Categories: Fossils

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