Noted paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey says scientific discoveries may soon make the debate over evolution a part of history. The Kenyan-born scientist serves as a professor at Stony Brook University on New York’s Long Island and recently spent a month in New York raising funds for his Turkana Basin Institute. Leakey says the institute welcomes scientists,…
The Earth’s greatest mass extinction, 250 million years ago, was so severe that it took 10 million years for the planet to recover. Life was nearly wiped out, with only 10% of plants and animals surviving. And the sheer intensity of the crisis, and continuing grim conditions on Earth after the first wave of extinction,…
Organic molecules — compounds that on Earth can be linked with life — encased within Martian meteorites now reveal biological activity on the Red Planet could not have formed these materials, researchers say. Organic molecules are the carbon-based raw materials that building blocks of life such as proteins and DNA are made from. These organic…
The transition from swimming to walking involved some awkward first steps, according to a new study that recreated how one of the first animals, which left the sea for land, moved. The study found that that the fishy four-limbed animal Ichthyostega used its front limbs like crutches, pushing its body up and forward onto land…
Ink from 160-million-year-old giant squid is essentially identical to today’s squid ink. The discovery suggests that the ink and the ink-screen escape mechanism of squid have not evolved much (if at all) since the Jurassic Period. The finding, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, might just prove that if it…
Unidentified life-forms “breach the limits of life as we know it.”
Amber from 100-million-year-old deposits in Northern Spain has preserved and revealed the first ever record of insect pollination, scientists say. Specimens of tiny insects covered with pollen grains in two pieces of Cretaceous era amber are the first record of pollen transport and social behavior in this group of animals, researchers said. The amber featured…
Ever wonder exactly where grizzly bears live on this continent? Or where you might find Myotis lucifungus, the fuzzy, adorable little brown bat that is currently threatened with extinction because of white-nose syndrome? Now you can track them on Google Maps, thanks to a new program that aims to plot the location of every single…
A previously little-considered heating effect could shrink estimates of the habitable zone of the Milky Way’s most numerous class of stars — ‘M’ or red dwarfs — by up to one half, says Rory Barnes, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. That factor — gravitational heating via tides — suggests a menagerie…
A basic tenet underpinning scientists’ understanding of extinction is that more abundant species persist longer than their less abundant counterparts, but a new University of Georgia study reveals a much more complex relationship. A team of scientists analyzed more than 46,000 fossils from 52 sites and found that greater numbers did indeed help clam-like brachiopods…