fossil

Stories 21 - 40 | << Prev   Next >>

Fat From This Fossil Solved Decades-Old Mystery
Fat From This Fossil
Solved Decades-Old Mystery
NEW STUDY
Sep 21, 2018 8:56 AM CDT

Fat From This Fossil Solved Decades-Old Mystery

Study says Dickinsonia is earliest confirmed animal in geological record

(Newser) - A researcher calls it "a decades-old mystery that has been the Holy Grail of paleontology": What, exactly, Dickinsonia was. It's one of a group of lifeforms called the Ediacaran biota, which the BBC describes as the "first complex multi-cellular organisms to appear on Earth." But for...

Girl&#39;s &#39;Moana Rock&#39; Actually Something More
Bored by Soccer Game, Girl
Digs in Dirt, Makes Wild Find
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Mar 25, 2018 7:43 AM CDT

Bored by Soccer Game, Girl Digs in Dirt, Makes Wild Find

7-year-old 'delighted' with ammonite fossil found in Oregon

(Newser) - At 7 years old, Naomi Vaughan probably has a hard time wrapping her head around a 65 million-year span. But that's the minimum amount of time elapsed between the death of a tiny sea creature and when Naomi picked up its remains. Bored with her sister's soccer game...

Sahara Desert Reveals 'Holy Grail' of Dino Discoveries

African dinosaur suggests link to Europe in late Cretaceous Period

(Newser) - Researcher Matt Lamanna calls it "the Holy Grail" of dinosaur discoveries. After decades of digging had left a 44-million-year gap in the fossil record for dinos in Africa, Lamanna says his jaw "hit the floor" when he saw photos of skull fragments, a lower jaw, neck and back...

Found in China: Dino With a &#39;Rainbow Glimmer&#39;
Found in China: Dino
With a 'Rainbow Glimmer'
NEW STUDY
Jan 15, 2018 9:01 AM CST

Found in China: Dino With a 'Rainbow Glimmer'

Jurassic Period's 'Caihong juji' had shimmering feathers like those found on hummingbirds

(Newser) - Scientists are now saying there may have been "a more colorful Jurassic World than we previously imagined," thanks to the recent discovery of a fossil in China's Hebei province. Reuters reports that a closer look at the "exquisitely preserved," almost completely intact fossil of a...

Rarest of Rare Discoveries: a Swimming Dinosaur


Rarest of Rare
Discoveries:
a Swimming
Dinosaur
NEW STUDY
Dec 7, 2017 10:15 AM CST

Rarest of Rare Discoveries: a Swimming Dinosaur

It's believed to be only the 2nd swimming dinosaur ever found

(Newser) - The dinosaur was the size of a turkey and had a neck like a swan, teeth like a crocodile, forelimbs similar to a penguin's flippers, and clawed feet ideal for use on land. It's such a strange assortment of features that researchers who identified the new species from...

Boy Trips Over Million-Year-Old Piece of History
Boy Tripped
While Hiking,
Made Big Find
in the Process
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Jul 23, 2017 6:30 AM CDT

Boy Tripped While Hiking, Made Big Find in the Process

Jude Sparks accidentally uncovered a stegomastodon skull

(Newser) - Luck came not once, but twice for Jude Sparks. The then-9-year-old was lucky enough to trip not on a rock, or a tree root, but on a 1.2-million-year-old fossil when trying to dash away from his brothers on a November desert hike with his family. And as New Mexico...

Scientists 'Very Excited' About 150K-Year-Old Baby Tooth

It's the oldest Denisovan fossil yet, found in a Siberian cave

(Newser) - Scientists are "very excited" to learn more about a baby tooth that only the most sophisticated DNA dating tech can analyze. Some 150,000 years ago, a young girl lost her baby tooth, and it fell into the sediment of a cave in Siberia from which the first three...

New Fossils Push Known Human History Back 100K Years

And change what we thought we knew about human history and evolution

(Newser) - “My reaction was a big ‘wow,'” archaeologist Jean-Jacques Hublin tells the Guardian . Hublin and his team recently discovered Homo sapien fossils in an old mine in Morocco that dating tests reveal are 300,000 years old. Prior to the discovery, the earliest known Homo sapien fossils...

Scientists Claim Discovery of World's Oldest Life

But not everyone is convinced

(Newser) - Researchers say they've found fossilized bacteria that may date back to shortly after the formation of the Earth (geologically speaking, anyway), the New York Times reports. They published their findings Wednesday in Nature . The rocks were collected in 2008 from the Nuvvuagittuq geological formation in Canada. The rocks are...

Giant Prehistoric Otter Found&mdash;but Why So Big?
Giant Prehistoric Otter
Found—but Why So Big?
new study
Jan 24, 2017 2:40 PM CST

Giant Prehistoric Otter Found—but Why So Big?

The size of a wolf, the bite of a badger

(Newser) - Picture an otter, then envision it ballooning to twice—or triple, or quadruple—its size until it's a 110-pound creature: It's not a journey into the imagination, but to yesteryear. An international team of scientists has announced news of the largest otter ever found, one that lived some...

Fossil Fills in Big Blank About the Mysterious 'Ghost Shark'

It belongs to an early chimaera, not a shark

(Newser) - The chimaera, or so-called "ghost shark," is an elusive deep-water fish that has fascinated biologists for more than a century. Like its relative the shark, however, it's made of cartilage and thus rarely fossilizes, so little is known about its evolutionary past, reports Live Science . Now the...

Dinosaur Fossil Is One of the 'Saddest' Ever Found

Creature died with its wings and neck outstretched

(Newser) - Workers were blasting through the ground of a school construction site in the Ganzhou region of China four years ago when they found what scientist Steve Brusatte is calling "one of the most beautiful, but saddest, fossils I've ever seen," reports the Telegraph . That's because the...

Scientists Believe They've Found Fossilized Dino Brain

It would be a major first

(Newser) - Are we one step closer to Jurassic Park? Probably not, but researchers do believe they've found the first ever example of fossilized brain tissue from a dinosaur, National Geographic reports. The fossil was found on an English beach in 2004, but its unique trait—mineralized pieces of brain tissue—...

Meet the World&#39;s Oldest Known Righty
Meet the World's
Oldest Known Righty
Oct 25, 2016 12:12 PM CDT

Meet the World's Oldest Known Righty

Telltale scratches on teeth go back nearly 2M years

(Newser) - A lot has changed over 1.8 million years, but perhaps not the tendency of hominids to favor their right hand. An upper jawbone belonging to a human relative who lived in what is now Tanzania almost 2 million years ago has been discovered with scratches on its still-intact teeth,...

These Rocks May Hold Oldest Evidence of Life on Earth

Researchers say Greenland stromatolites are 3.7B years old

(Newser) - Researchers claim to have discovered evidence of life on Earth more than 200 million years before the oldest known fossils, the BBC reports. A layer of permanent snow melted away last spring on Greenland's Isua supracrustal belt, revealing a series of wavy peaks called stromatolites in the 3.7...

One of Most Complete T. Rex Skulls Ever Arrives at Museum

'An iconic specimen'

(Newser) - It may look like a giant rock right now, but inside is what dinosaur expert Jack Horner calls "one of the most significant" Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found, the AP reports. According to the Seattle Times , a 2,500-pound, plaster-encased lump of dirt and rock arrived at the Burke...

North America's 1st Monkey Crossed a Sea to Get There

And it arrived 18M years before scientists thought possible

(Newser) - Researchers have discovered evidence that monkeys arrived in North America 18 million years earlier than previously believed, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature . And they were truly impressive monkeys indeed. The newly discovered Panamacebus transitus had to somehow cross the 100 miles of water that separated South America...

Scientists Finally Know Why Snakes Lost Their Legs

Apparently it was a need to burrow underground

(Newser) - "How snakes lost their legs has long been a mystery to scientists," Dr. Hongyu Yi says in a press release from the University of Edinburgh. But that mystery may have finally been solved thanks to a 90 million-year-old skull and advanced CT scan technology. It's been long...

Scientists Find Tropical Forest—in the Arctic

It would have thrived near the equator 380M years ago

(Newser) - Bet you didn't know there was a tropical forest in the Arctic. That's what scientists say they've uncovered in Svalbard, Norway, though the remnants of the forest are actually 380 million years old and fossilized. Back when the early trees—a type dubbed Protolepidodendropsis pulchra—were alive...

Ancient Crystals Rewrite 300M Years of History

Life may have started 'almost instantaneously'

(Newser) - Life of one kind or another has been around on this planet for 300 million years longer than thought, according to US researchers who took a close look at some incredibly ancient crystals unearthed in Australia. The scientists say that the zircon crystals from 4.1 billion years ago contain...

Stories 21 - 40 | << Prev   Next >>