Dinosaur claws had many functions, but now a team from the University of Bristol and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing has shown some predatory dinosaurs used their claws for digging or even for display.
By exploring the stability and collapse of marine ecosystems during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction, researchers gain insights into modern biodiversity crisis
It is called Radiocarbon 3.0: it is the newest method developments in radiocarbon dating, and promises to reveal valuable new insights about key events in the earliest human history, starting with the interaction between Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals in Europe.
Plants can move in ways that might surprise you. Some of them even show “sleep movements,” folding or raising their leaves each night before opening them again the next day.
A review article published today in Nature addresses this conflict between models and evidence, known as the Holocene global temperature conundrum. Lead author Darrell Kaufman, a Regents’ professor in the School of Earth and Sustainability, and University of Arizona postdoctoral researcher Ellie Broadman, a co-author who worked on this study while earning her Ph.D. at NAU, analyzed a broad swath of available data from the last 12,000 years to break down the conundrum.
Aetosaurs had a small head and a crocodile-like body. The land dwellers were up to six meters long and widely distributed geographically. They died out about 204 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic.
Along the shores of Africa’s Lake Victoria in Kenya roughly 2.9 million years ago, early human ancestors used some of the oldest stone tools ever found to butcher hippos and pound plant material, according to new research led by scientists with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Queens College, CUNY, as well as the National Museums of Kenya, Liverpool John Moores University and the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Geologists are interested in the sedimentary cycle – erosion from mountains that forms sand that is carried out to the ocean – because it’s foundational for understanding how the planet works.
Ongoing climate change driven by greenhouse gas emissions is often discussed in terms of global average warming. For example, the landmark Paris Agreement seeks to limit global warming to 1.5 ⁰C, relative to pre-industrial levels. However, the extent of future warming will not be the same throughout the planet. One of the clearest regional differences in climate change is the faster warming over land than sea. This “terrestrial amplification” of future warming has real-world implications for understanding and dealing with climate change.
Around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic revolution radically changed the economy, diet and structure of the first human societies in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East.
Scientists discovered the first-ever Dickinsonia fossil in India two years ago, changing our understanding of how the continent came to be. Now, new research shows the "fossil" was just a beehive all along, changing our understanding for a second time, and the original scientists now support the new findings.
Attempts to discredit human-caused climate change by touting graphs of prehistoric atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature changes are not something new. Peter Clack has once again tried to make a point that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are comparatively low compared to past eras. But just because we're in an advantageous era compared to past eras, it does not negate the cause for alarm concerning our current warming trend.
Two sister species of near-primate, called “primatomorphans,” dating back about 52 million years have been identified by researchers at the University of Kansas as the oldest to have dwelled north of the Arctic Circle.
Nearly 100 million years ago, the Earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption that choked oxygen from the oceans and led to elevated marine extinction levels that affected the entire globe.
A rare three-dimensional fossil of an ancient chimaera has revealed new clues about the diversity of these creatures in the Carboniferous period, some 300 million years ago.
If you take a magnifying glass and a torch and look at your teeth very carefully in the mirror, in places you can spot a pattern of fine, parallel lines running across your teeth. These correspond to the striae of Retzius that mark the growth of our tooth enamel.
Fishes living in the twilight zone of the oceans reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide and are a huge food resource, but little is known about their response to climate warming. Geologist-Palaeontologist Konstantina Agiadi from the University of Vienna led a study funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) that used fossils to answer this question. The results, published by the international team in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, suggest that mesopelagic fishes overall shrink with warming.
Scientists have discovered that the atmosphere contained far less CO2 than previously thought when forests emerged on our planet, the new study has important implications for understanding how land plants affect the climate.
Europasaurus is a long-necked, herbivorous dinosaur that lived in the Late Jurassic, about 154 million years ago, on a small island in modern-day Germany. Recently, scientists from the universities of Vienna and Greifswald examined fossil braincase material of Europasaurus with the aid of micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). The digital reconstruction of the inner ear of Europasaurus gave the researchers new insights not only into its hearing ability, but also into its reproductive and social behaviour. The study was recently published in eLife.
Marine giants make migrations across the ocean to give birth where predators are scarce, congregating annually along the same stretches of coastline. A study suggests that 200 million years before whales evolved, school bus-sized marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs may have made similar migrations.
Curtin University researchers have revealed how the pelvic fins of fish such as sharks and chimaeras have evolved from their sudden appearance in the fossil record over 410 million years ago.
Discoveries at a major new fossil site in Morocco suggest giant arthropods – relatives of modern creatures including shrimps, insects and spiders – dominated the seas 470 million years ago.
A team of researchers led by Narimane Chatar, a doctoral student at the EDDyLab of the University of Liège (Belgium), has tested the biting efficiency of Smilodon, an extinct species of carnivore close to the extant felines.
Diplodocids – large herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails – may have been able to move their tails like bullwhips at speeds of up to 33 metres per second (more than 100 kilometres per hour), according to a modelling study published in Scientific Reports.
A specimen retrieved from a cupboard of the Natural History Museum in London has shown that modern lizards originated in the Late Triassic and not the Middle Jurassic as previously thought.
One of Australia’s most captivating landscapes can now be explored virtually, thanks to a University of South Australia project that documents the geological and cultural significance of the Flinders Ranges.
UNLV analysis challenges the idea that ocean ecosystems have barely changed over millions of years, pointing scientists down a new path on conservation efforts and policy.
The Field Museum in Chicago is home to the best, most-complete fossils of a prehistoric superpredator-- but one that lived hundreds of millions of years before SUE the T. rex. Whatcheeria was a six-foot-long lake-dwelling creature with a salamander-like body and a long, narrow head; its fossils were discovered in a limestone quarry near the town of What Cheer, Iowa.
The contents of the last meal consumed by the earliest animals known to inhabit Earth more than 550 million years ago has unearthed new clues about the physiology of our earliest animal ancestors, according to scientists from The Australian National University (ANU).
A decline in the element molybdenum across the planet’s oceans preceded a significant extinction event approximately 183 million years ago, new research from Florida State University shows.
Earth is currently in the midst of a mass extinction, losing thousands of species each year. New research suggests environmental changes caused the first such event in history, which occurred millions of years earlier than scientists previously realized.
Artificial intelligence has revealed that prehistoric footprints thought to be made by a vicious dinosaur predator were in fact from a timid herbivore.