Nature - The Parnassian (Page 3)

Geography · Science · Nature

An Asteroid Fell into the North Sea, 130 km off the Yorkshire Coast

The dispute over the origin of the Silverpit crater went on for more than twenty years after its discovery. Scholars split into several camps: the first saw the trace of an asteroid, the second the shifting of underground salt layers, the third a volcanic collapse of the seabed. In 2009

Moscow · Observations · Heritage · Society · Nature

You know, when they started digging up all of Kolomenskoye in 2024 under the reserve's "improvement" programme, I made a private wager: would they, I wondered, tackle the matters that genuinely call for intervention?

You know, when they started digging up all of Kolomenskoye in 2024 under the reserve's "improvement" programme, I made a private wager: would they, I wondered, tackle the matters that genuinely call for intervention? The destruction, for instance, of the thickets of an invasive species, Sakhalin

Archaeology · Science · Nature

Archaeologist Susan deFrance of the University of Florida describes two naturally mummified dogs found in southern Peru

One dog is under a year old, a mottled female; the other is a puppy no more than three months old. The finds are about 1,100 years old. Mummification occurs of its own accord in the dry climate of the region, but what interested the scholars was the context

Museums · Heritage · Palaeontology · Nature

The World's First Monument to a Mammoth Was Erected in 1841 in the Village of Kuleshovka

The inscription on the pedestal reads: This extraordinary rarity was discovered in the presence of the proprietor, Chief Chamberlain Count Yu. A. Golovkin The memorial commemorates a mammoth skeleton found on this spot in 1839. The skeleton was dug out of a riverbank cliff on the estate of Count Yury

Archaeology · Science · Nature · Ethnography

The terms “invasive” and “non-native” carry fatal legal consequences for biological species

The terms “invasive” and “non-native” carry fatal legal consequences for biological species. These labels, in essence, open the way to measures up to and including the complete destruction of populations. In science this is called eradication. What mostly comes to mind are examples of the total eradication of species

NB! · Science · Palaeontology · Nature

A new species of ant, Aethiocarenus burmanicus, with a triangular head and bulging eyes able to look backwards, discovered by scientists of Oregon State University in a piece of amber 100 million years old

Archaeology · Science · Nature

A team of researchers from Oxford, let us call the collective MacLeod and colleagues, has found traces of the plague bacillus about 5,500 years old in the DNA of the hunter-gatherers of the Baikal region

A team of researchers from Oxford, let us call the collective MacLeod and colleagues, has found traces of the plague bacillus about 5,500 years old in the DNA of the hunter-gatherers of the Baikal region. This is the earliest outbreak of plague recorded in archaeological material. The Plague

Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature

Triceratops skull named Sophia, valued at $600,000–800,000, goes to auction in the US with a starting price of $360,000

Sophia is a juvenile, that is, an individual incapable of reproduction at the time of death. Her skull, about two metres long from snout to frill, was recovered five years ago from the Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota. The same site yielded the skull of a pachycephalosaurus, recently bought

Archive · Observations · Nature

A Boy with Burdock Leaves from the Kaluga Region Will Bring You Summer

1992, photograph by Vladimir Karlov, featuring Dima Sukhanov

Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour

Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates

Next time, before you kill a centipede at home, remember that its ancestors came ashore 80 million years before the vertebrates. The first myriapods appeared some 460 million years ago. That is 35 million years earlier than the oldest known myriapod fossils. In the world onto which they crawled, or

Archaeology · Science · Nature

It Turns Out the Etruscans Cloned a Single Grape Variety for Centuries

It turns out the Etruscans cloned a single grape variety for centuries. And it was white. In Chianti, at the Etruscan-Roman site of Cetamura, researchers studied grape pips from the bottoms of wells cut into the rock. They found that most of the pips in the study date from

Science · Palaeontology · Nature

The first animals are thought to have appeared in the Ediacaran, some 635 to 539 million years ago, but then came millions of years of calm, until a sudden diversity burst forth

A study from Cambridge, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, tries to answer the question of where this pause came from. The version runs as follows. Early animals reproduced asexually. They spread by stolons, runners, like the modern strawberry, producing copies of themselves. In the bountiful Ediacaran seas this worked