Fossils | The Verge

How Jurassic Park led to the modernization of dinosaur paleontology

2018-06-23T13:00:01-04:00

Paleontologist Steve Brusatte loves Jurassic Park. Without it, he jokes, he wouldn't even have a job. So he's not going to criticize all the inaccuracies in the Hollywood franchise. But he's also studied dinosaurs his whole life (real ones, with feathers), so he loves talking about giant creatures that ruled over the Earth millions of years ago.

In his new book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World, Brusatte, a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, charts the origins of dinosaurs from the beginning of the Triassic period all the way to their abrupt disappearance about 66 million years ago. He also …

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Brave birds run around racetrack to teach us about dinosaurs

2018-02-24T09:00:02-05:00

In a quest to learn how two-legged dinosaurs moved, scientists watched their descendants - birds - run around on a race track. After all, chickens were once carnivorous dinosaurs that stalked the Earth on giant drumsticks.

For all the movies that show dinosaurs chasing after humans, we don't actually know much about what a walking or running dinosaur looked like. Footprints and fossils, for example, can't tell us whether a dino strode or strutted. "They're static records of an animal or its movement," says Peter Bishop, a scientist at the Queensland Museum. For movement, he says, "That's when you've got to study animals that are living toda …

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Ancient cave paintings turn out to be by Neanderthals, not modern humans

2018-02-22T14:07:04-05:00

This curtain of stalactites in Ardales cave in Spain was painted with red pigment more than 65,000 years ago — then again 45,000 years ago. | Photo by C.D. Standish

A new discovery that Neanderthals were painting cave walls more than 64,000 years ago has anthropologists rethinking the history of art. Found deep in Spanish caves, the rock art was once thought to be the work of modern humans, but the new dates mean that Neanderthals must have figured out fingerpainting, too.

Using a new and improved radioactive dating technique, researchers discovered that paintings in three different caves were created more than 64,800 years ago. That means the paintings were created 20,000 years before modern humans, or Homo sapiens, arrived in Spain, according to a study published today in the journal Science. The dis …

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The dinosaur-murdering asteroid maybe also triggered an underwater volcano meltdown

2018-02-07T17:02:59-05:00

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The cataclysmic asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs might have also triggered massive volcanic eruptions deep beneath the ocean, new research says. It's yet another way the extraterrestrial impact could have killed off more than 70 percent of life on Earth - that is, if the timing isn't just a coincidence.

Roughly 66 million years ago, a 6-mile-wide asteroid crashed into Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula - causing a massive, worldwide earthquake. That Earth-shaking impact might have made underwater volcanoes spit up magma even more ferociously than usual, according to a study published today in the journal Science Advances. These events might ha …

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It is possible to make spiders creepier, ancient fossils in amber show

2018-02-05T15:22:31-05:00

An artist’s reconstruction of C. Yingi, which probably used its long, whip-like tail as a kind of antenna to sense its environment. | Image by the University of Kansas | KU News Service

About 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, four, tiny spider-like creatures became trapped in amber. Today, scientists announced they belong to an entirely new species. But experts disagree about how these fossils relate to modern-day spiders, because there's something strange about their crumpled corpses: all four of them have tails.

The fossils, described today in two different studies in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, look like spiders. But no living spiders have tails. That's why one of today's studies argues that this new species is a member of an extinct group of primitive spider relatives called uraraneids …

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Discovery of ancient stone tools rewrites the history of technology in India

2018-01-31T13:23:41-05:00

Stone tools recovered at the Attirampakkam site in India. | Photo: Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, India

A new discovery of stone tools from about 385,000 years ago has anthropologists rethinking the history of technology. The stone tools, found at a site in southern India, were sophisticated blades chipped from chunks of quartz, which is a technique that experts previously thought came to India only about 125,000 years ago.

Archaeologists analyzed more than 7,200 stone tools and found that this sophisticated tool-making technique, called Levallois, began replacing clunkier and more primitive stone tools between 449,000 and 321,000 years ago. This discovery is the earliest evidence of Levallois technology in India, according to a study publish …

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Jaw fossil discovered in Israel looks human, but it’s much older than it should be

2018-01-25T20:30:14-05:00

Close-up of the teeth discovered at the Misliya cave in Israel. | Photo: Gerhard Weber, University of Vienna

What might be the oldest human remains found outside of Africa are an ancient chunk of upper jaw still sporting a handful of teeth. Discovered in a cave in Israel, the fossil places ancient humans in the Middle East more than 177,000 years ago - some 60,000 years earlier than we thought. That is, if the jaw really is human.

Researchers confirmed that the fossil was between 177,000 to 194,00 years old using three different dating methods. And what's more - the shape of the fossil looked more human than Neanderthal. That means Homo sapiens might have already started migrating out of Africa more than 194,000 years ago, according to the article …

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‘Abundant bleeding’ epidemic in 16th-century Mexico might have been Salmonella

2018-01-15T18:47:38-05:00

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Study co-author Christina Warinner in the full protective gear necessary for studying ancient DNA. | Photo: Christina Warinner/Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History

A mysterious epidemic that killed millions of people in 16th century Mexico may be linked to a rare strain of Salmonella, a new DNA analysis reveals. The discovery is the best clue yet to the cause of a devastating infection that killed up to 80 percent of Mexico's native population between 1545 and 1550 - spreading to Guatemala, and possibly as far south as Peru.

At the time, no one had ever seen anything like this disease: it made its victims bleed from their faces. Medical texts from the period show stacks of corpses and people speckled by rashes, gushing blood from their noses. Indigenous peoples called it "huey cocoliztli," or great pe …

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This 450-year-old mummy contains the oldest evidence of hepatitis B

2018-01-05T10:57:04-05:00

The pockmarked skin of this mummy (left) was once thought to have been from smallpox. Now, scientists suspect that hepatitis B (right) caused the rash. | Images from Gino Fornaciari and the CDC

Once, this boy mummy was thought to have died of smallpox, but a new analysis of his now 450-year-old DNA reveals signs of hepatitis B, instead - the oldest known infection of the virus. The puzzling new diagnosis is made stranger still by the similarity between the mummy's hepatitis B virus and modern-day strains, suggesting this virus has been infecting people for thousands of years.

This tiny mummy was exhumed from an Italian church in the 1980s, and scientists have studied it ever since. Its desiccated face, arms, and torso were pitted with a rash so severe that paleopathologist Gino Fornaciari posthumously diagnosed the child with smal …

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Ancient baby’s DNA reveals completely unknown branch of Native American family tree

2018-01-03T16:57:03-05:00

The excavation at the Upward River Sun site in Alaska. | Photo by Ben Potter

An Alaskan baby buried 11,500 years ago has clued scientists in to a forgotten branch of the Native American family tree. This child's DNA is more genetically ancient than the ancestors of modern Native Americans - so it must have come from a previously unknown, even earlier population, the study says.

By analyzing the infant's genome, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of Copenhagen found that while all ancient Native Americans originated in East Asia, the family tree branched roughly 20,000 years ago. One group - the infant's group, now named the Ancient Beringians - lived in the frozen north and eventu …

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