A volcanic eruption around 579 million years ago buried a ‘nursery’ of the earliest-known animals under a Pompeii-like deluge of ash, preserving them as fossils in rocks in Newfoundland, new research suggests. An international team looked for evidence of life from the mysterious Ediacaran period (635-542 million years ago) in which the first ‘animals’ –…
It was a provocative finding: strange bacteria in a California lake that thrived on something completely unexpected — arsenic. What it suggested is that life, a very different kind of life, could possibly exist on some other planet. The research, published by a leading scientific journal in 2010, led to overheated speculation about how life…
Early dinosaurs probably looked a lot more like Big Bird than scientists once suspected. A newly discovered, nearly complete fossilized skeleton hints that all dinosaurs may have sported feathers. Researchers have found feathered dinosaurs before, but this one is more distantly related to birds than any previously discovered. Called Sciurumimus albersdoerferi, it belongs to a…
University of Alberta researchers have uncovered physical proof that animals existed 585 million years ago, 30 million years earlier than all previous established records show. The researchers found fossilized tracks of a centimeter-long, slug-like animal left behind 585 million years ago in a silty sediment. The research team determined that the tracks were made by…
Data from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn’s moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell. Researchers saw a large amount of squeezing and stretching as the moon orbited Saturn. They deduced that if Titan were composed entirely of stiff rock, the gravitational attraction of Saturn would cause bulges, or…
A rare and highly reactive iron mineral called green rust appears to have played an important role in ancient oceans, suggest new findings, which may have implications for the formation of Earth’s early atmosphere. The research team identified green rust in an Indonesian lake where conditions mimic those of the ancient oceans, and found the…
The long-standing belief that dinosaurs were cold-blooded may have been premature, if new research into herbivorous mammals is anything to go by, potentially overturning dino theory. Dinosaurs had long been assumed cold-blooded because bone microstructures identified in fossilized remains showed portions of slowed development also seen in lizards and crocodiles today. However, a new study…
The discovery of life beyond Earth would shake up our view of humanity’s place in the universe, but it probably wouldn’t seriously threaten organized religion, experts say. The Bible, Koran and other sacred texts of the world’s major religions stress God’s special concern for humanity and for Earth. So the discovery of aliens — microbes…
The amount of water in places of the Martian mantle is vastly larger than previous estimates and is similar to that of Earth’s, scientists have found. The finding is based on the analysis of the water content of two Martian meteorites originating from inside the Red Planet. The results not only affect what we know…
Up to 22 percent of the surfaces of Shackleton Crater, located near the moon’s south pole, may be water ice, new findings from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show. That may sound like a lot, but it adds up to only about 100 gallons of water inside the 12-mile wide, two-mile deep crater. “It’s not a…