The Spinosaurus is a sail-backed, crocodile-snouted dinosaur that Hollywood depicted as a giant terrestrial predator capable of taking down a T. rex in Jurassic Park 3. Then they changed their mind and made it a fully aquatic diver in Jurassic World Rebirth—a rendering that was more in line with the latest paleontological knowledge. But now, deep in the Sahara Desert, a team of researchers led by Paul C. Sereno discovered new Spinosaurus fossils suggesting both scientists and filmmakers might have got it all wrong again.
Although there are many amber stones containing a single creature, there are fewer that include two or more, as is the case with a pair of mosquitoes trapped in amber 130 million years ago which tell us that, back then, males also sucked blood. Even more extraordinary is when several organisms can be seen interacting, either eating the other, acting as a parasite, or cooperating.
In a sudden turn of events last Wednesday the U.S. Food and Drug Administration agreed to review Moderna's new mRNA flu vaccine, according to the company. The announcement came roughly a week after Moderna revealed that the FDA had rejected its application. The company said the agency originally called the plan for the vaccine's phase 3 trials acceptable, But its position changed after top FDA official Vinay Prasad overruled the agency's reviewers, according to STAT.
For example, reader David Erickson had this on his mind: If there were aliens 66 million light-years from Earth, how big a telescope would they need to see dinosaurs? Ha! I love this question. I've thought of it myself but never worked out the mathexcept to think, Probably pretty big, which turns out to dramatically underestimate the actual answer.
Sauropodshumongous reptiles with a long neck and tail and thick, elephantlike legsplayed a starring role in the dinosaur ecosystem, according to a new study. These massive dinosaurs are the largest creatures to ever walk on land. But they also played a crucial part in the food chain, the study authors write, acting as ecosystem engineers. The research was published on Friday in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin.
At first glance, it looked like Wooller and his colleagues might have found evidence that mammoths lived in central Alaska just 2,000 years ago. But ancient DNA revealed that two "mammoth" bones actually belonged to a North Pacific right whale and a minke whale-which raised a whole new set of questions. The team's hunt for Alaska's last mammoth had turned into an epic case of mistaken identity, starring two whale species and a mid-century fossil hunter.
Wooden objects carrying the marks of carving and use could be the oldest wooden tools ever found. Researchers dated the artefacts, found in what is now Greece, to 430,000 years ago - and suggest they might have been made by early Neanderthals or their ancestors, Homo heidelbergensis. A separate study describes 480,000-old flint-knapping tools made from antler and elephant bone, from what is now the United Kingdom.
Since the version of the article initially published, the copyright line has been amended to North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and James Napoli, under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.
We have little physical evidence of these interactions turning violent, however, because burials were rare and carnivores were more likely to finish off their prey. That's why the embellished burial site of a 15-year-old from 27,000 years ago is an important window into the past: the teenager's bones indicate he was mauled by a bear. The finding represents some of the first evidence of its kind.
New research published today in Nature dates the boneschipped out from a cave called Grotte a Hominides and nearby it over decadesto about 773,000 years ago, during the era of the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Homo neanderthalensis and Denisovans (a group of humans that ranged across Asia and that does not have an agreed-upon species name). We can say that the shared ancestry between these three species is perhaps in Grotte a Hominides in Casablanca, says study co-author Abderrahim Mohib, a prehistorian at the National Institute of Archaeology and Heritage Sciences in Rabat, Morocco.
Dinosaur fever gripped the Western world during the early 1900s, fueled by the discovery of new, ever larger and more spectacular dinosaurs in Europe and especially in North America. Interest in these fossils was not merely driven by academic curiosity. Dinosaur skeletons and research had become a status symbol for museums and their financiers, whether government or private, and colonial powers turned to their areas of influence to find new remains.
Which animals came first? For more than a century, most evidence suggested that sponges, immobile filter-feeders that lack muscles, neurons and other specialized tissues, were the first animal lineages to emerge. Then, in 2008, a genomic study pointed to a head-scratching rival: dazzling, translucent predators called comb jellies, or ctenophores, with nerves, muscles and other sophisticated features. That single study ignited a debate that has raged for nearly 20 years, sparking fierce arguments about how complexity evolved in animals.
