German palaeontologists have dug up the remains of nine turtle pairs that died while mating some 47 million years ago, sinking into poisonous waters while locked in a final embrace, according to a report in the Royal Society Journal Biology Letters. The find represents the first-ever fossil record of copulating vertebrates. “Millions of animals live…
Thank goodness for granite. If not for the formation and subsequent erosion of large quantities of metal-rich granite on a supercontinent that formed billions of years ago, the evolution of multicellular life—including us—could have been stifled or delayed, according to a new study. For much of its history, life on Earth existed as only single-celled…
The morphology of coelacanths has not fundamentally changed since the Devonian age, that is, for about 400 million years. Nevertheless, these animals known as living fossils are able to genetically adapt to their environment. This is described by Dr. Kathrin Lampert from the RUB’s Department of Animal Ecology, Evolution and Biodiversity along with colleagues from…
Peer far enough back in the human family lineage, and you’ll find a fishy ancestor that looked surprisingly like a shark. In fact, this now-extinct fish was among the first to split from sharks, whose bones are made of cartilage, to evolve into a line of tough-boned species that includes everything from bony fish to…
Physicists investigating the make-up of the universe are closing in on the Higgs boson, an elusive particle thought to have been key to turning debris from the Big Bang into stars, planets and finally life, scientists said. Researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) are using their large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s…
A study of rocks in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Syria provides powerful support for the theory that a major impact helped wipe out mammoths and other megafauna, and destroyed a major prehistoric culture. They’ve discovered melt-glass material dating back nearly 13,000 years, and formed at temperatures of 1,700 to 2,200 degrees Celsius. The new data…
Researchers who were looking for organisms that eke out a living in some of the most inhospitable soils on Earth have found a hardy few. A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi, and other rudimentary organisms, called archaea,…
They can “smell” chemicals and respond to light, but can plants hear sounds? It seems chilli seeds can sense neighboring plants even if those neighbors are sealed in a box, suggesting plants have an as yet unrecognized sense. Plants are known to have many of the senses we do: they can sense changes in light…
Millions of years ago, oversized insects like griffinflies boasting wingspans comparable to today’s hawks scuttled across (and fluttered above) the planet. But why these jumbo jets of the insect world shrunk to modern size has remained a mystery, until now. Turns out, as dinosaurs evolved flight and eventually took to the skies as birds, they…
Nearly 20,000 species of animals and plants around the globe are considered high risks for extinction in the wild. That’s according to the most authoritative compilation of living things at risk — the so-called Red List maintained by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. This should keep us awake at night. By generalizing from…