Science · Palaeontology · Nature
David DeMar of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington found the specimen in 2016 in north-eastern Montana, while collecting fossil fish. He picked up a dark reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball, examined its surface through a hand lens and saw a
Archaeology · Observations · Science · Palaeontology
Whoever has not yet tired of following my scholarly work may like to hear about two interesting recent articles on my subject. One, by Ben Potter, maintains that the Palaeoindians were megafauna specialists who followed the mammoths from Alaska to Patagonia. Nothing especially sensational here. But the second article, by
Museums · Heritage · Palaeontology · Nature
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
NB! · Science · Palaeontology · Nature
Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature
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
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. 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
Science · Palaeontology · Nature
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
Science · Palaeontology · Nature · Humour
The first: the European fallow deer bears the Latin binomial name Dama dama. And this Dama has nothing whatever to do with the word dame, "woman". Dama was used in ancient Rome for small hoofed animals that grew easily accustomed to people, and is thought to go back
Archaeology · Geography · Palaeontology
In two elite burials on the Pacific coast of Panama, El Caño and Sitio Conte, dating to around AD 800–1000, five emeralds mined in Colombia more than 1,000 years ago were found alongside gold, pyrite mirrors and fossilised megalodon teeth. It turned out that the stones had travelled
Archaeology · Heritage · Science · Palaeontology · Nature
The 17th-century "Whalers' Cemetery" on Spitsbergen, by the Likneset station, has begun to thaw after 400 years. And now Norwegian archaeologists are examining knitted woollen stockings, finely woven woollen trousers, blue silk neckerchiefs, fragments of blue-striped linen shirts, caps and blankets found in remarkably well-
Science · Palaeontology · Nature
The discovery casts doubt on the hypothesis that complex, mobile animals were widely active before the celebrated "Cambrian explosion". The findings became possible thanks to micro- and nanotomography at a state-of-the-art beamline of Sirius, the Brazilian particle accelerator. The technology made it possible to study
Archaeology · Science · Palaeontology
Researchers from the University of Aberdeen have analysed marks on the teeth of the narrow-nosed rhinoceros Stephanorhinus hemitoechus from two Middle Palaeolithic sites in Spain and France, dating to some 100,000 years ago. The grooves, notches, sliding marks and scratches proved to be precisely what repeated percussion leaves