jorolat's blog
Fossil bones of a mouse-sized creature that died between 16 million and 19 million years ago have been discovered on the South Island of New Zealand. It is the first hard evidence that the islands once had their own indigenous land mammals.
..."The amazing thing is, it is unlike any other fossil mammal found anywhere else,"...
Scientists at Manchester University (UK) have discovered that a dinosaur traditionally regarded as one of the most violent actually used its giant razor-sharp claw to climb trees.
The velociraptor* was immortalised in Steven Speilberg's 1993 film Jurassic Park, where it was depicted as a vicious hunter that slashed open its prey's intestine with its sickle-shaped claw.
Baton Rouge - Chris Austin (lab), assistant curator of herpetology at LSU's Museum of Natural Science, or LSUMNS, and adjunct professor in biological sciences, recently discovered a new species of lizard while conducting field research in Borneo.
Humans may have evolved altruistic traits as a result of a cultural 'tax' we paid to each other early in our evolution, a new study suggests.
The research also changes what we knew about the genetic makeup of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The sudden appearance of large animal fossils more than 500 million years ago - a problem that perplexed even Charles Darwin and is commonly known as 'Darwin's Dilemma' - may be due to a huge increase of oxygen in the world's oceans, says Queen's University paleontologist Guy Narbonne (homepage), an expert in the early evolution of animals and their ecosystems.
Scientists believe a species of bat has an inbuilt magnetic compass to find its way home over long distances, in addition to its famous echolocation*, which guides it around its neighbourhood.
The first fossils of half-billion-year-old clusters of soft-shelled eggs have been found preserved in a strange new way in south China: In glass - some of the eggs were even caught in the act of dividing.
"These findings provide a link between RNA silencing and the earliest mechanisms of RNA transcription - perhaps shedding light on both the origins of RNA replication (and therefore life) and the evolution of RNA silencing"
Bloomington, Indiana - The function of horned beetles' wild protrusions has been a matter of some consternation for biologists. Digging seemed plausible; combat and mate selection, more likely. Even Charles Darwin* once weighed in on the matter, suggesting - one imagines with some frustration - the horns were merely ornamental.
In this month's American Naturalist (December 2006) and the November 2006 issue of Evolution, Indiana University Bloomington scientists present an entirely new function for the horns...
Two video clips (18 minutes running time total) from the BBC TV/Discovery Channel Science and Nature documentary series "The Blue Planet", narrated by David Attenborough
High in the Sierra Nevada mountains, a new species of butterfly has emerged as a hybrid of two existing species. It is the first time that this type of species formation has been shown in animals, according to the report published online December 1 in Science Express.
"Darwin published 'On the Origin of Species' in 1859, but we are still learning about the ways new species can form," said Arthur Shapiro (info), professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis and co-author of the paper.
NASA researchers at Johnson Space Center, Houston have found organic materials that formed in the most distant reaches of the early Solar System preserved in a unique meteorite. The study was performed on the Tagish Lake carbonaceous chondrite, a rare type of meteorite that is rich in organic (carbon-bearing) compounds.
Oslo, Norway, November 30 (UPI): Breaking News - A Norwegian archaeologist has found what might be the African site of mankind's oldest ritual - a discovery said to change our knowledge of human history.
University of Oslo Associate Professor Sheila Coulson* and colleagues say their discovery in northwest Botswana means Homo sapiens began performing advanced rituals in Africa about 70,000 years ago.
The dinosaurs, along with the majority of all other animal species on Earth, went extinct approximately 65 million years ago. Some scientists have said that the impact of a large meteorite in the Yucatan Peninsula, in what is today Mexico, caused the mass extinction, while others argue that there must have been additional meteorite impacts or other stresses around the same time.
A new study provides compelling evidence that 'one and only one impact' caused the mass extinction, according to a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher...
An international team led by scientists from the United States and New Zealand have observed, for the first time, the bizarre deep-sea communities living around methane seeps off New Zealand's east coast.
[+ Three Videos]
