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A mysterious and potentially grisly find by two young boys in a wooded area has police and residents of Quincy, Mass., baffled. According to the Patriot Ledger newspaper, “On March 29, Sgt. Steven Leanues picked up what appears to be a decomposed foot that the boys found in the woods off Pantheon Road. Police Chief Frank Alvilhiera sent it to the medical examiner, who determined it is not human, although it appears to have five toes.” Tests are still being conducted, but the strange find has locals asking: What has five toes and looks like a foot — but isn’t?...

An ancient global warming event shrunk the earliest horses down to the size of scrawny housecats, according to new research that could have implications for what mammals might look like in a future warming world. During what's known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, about 56 million years ago, a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere and oceans boosted average global temperatures by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit (5.5 degrees Celsius) over 175,000 years. Mammals responded to this climate change by shrinking, with about one-third of species getting smaller. Now, new research reveals that these changes occurred in lockstep...

US brewer offers $1m Bigfoot reward US brewer Olympia Beer is offering US $1 million for “the safe return of “Bigfoot”. The year-long contest has started in “an effort to highlight the proud histories of both Bigfoot and Olympia Beer in the [US] Northwest”. The grand prize of $1m, will be paid to any person who finds “irrefutable evidence” of Bigfoot’s existence in compliance with the contest’s official rules. The brewer has joined forces with Bigfoot experts at The Falcon Project for the contest, which promises to be one of the most comprehensive searches for the mysterious beast. Evan and...

Since its daredevil landing on Mars last summer, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been avidly exploring its new home in Gale Crater. But there’s been one worry that several people have voiced since Curiosity launched — what if the rover contaminates the surface of Mars with Earth life? Mars and Earth are very different places. Earth’s butterscotchy little brother is a dry and gelid little world. Among its other hazards are surface pressures approaching 1000 times lower than at Earth’s sea level, temperatures which can be low enough to freeze carbon dioxide, and practically no oxygen. Full of curiosity of their...

File this under: What don’t we know?We just discovered slice “2″ is alive.  |1 – Continental crust | 2 -Oceanic crust | 3 – Upper Mantle | 4 – Lower Mantle | 5 – Outer Core | 6 – Inner Core | Image Credit: Dake You might have thought that photosynthetic life forms had the Earth covered, but according to some researchers the largest ecosystem on Earth was just discovered and announced last Thursday, and it’s powered by hydrogen, not photosynthesis.The Oceanic Crust is the rocky hard part under the mud that lies under the ocean. It covers 60% of...

Camels get their humps from giant ancestors which roamed the Arctic rather than the desert and stored fat on their back to help them survive polar conditions, researchers claim.New fragments of leg bone discovered in the far north of Canada suggest that modern camels are descended from ancestors which lived within the Arctic Circle. Thirty fossilised pieces of a lower leg bone belonging to a camel which lived 3.5 million years ago were found by researchers on Ellesmere Island, in Canada's High Arctic. The giant mammals would likely have measured up to 3.5m (11ft) in height and had one hump...

A phallus-shaped worm that lived 505 million years ago is heads above the rest—it’s a “missing link” between two lineages of acorn worms, a new study says. Dubbed Spartobranchus tenuis, the odd creature is a type of soft-bodied marine animal that’s rarely preserved in the fossil record. The new specimen was first discovered in the early 1900s in an area called the Burgess Shale, a fossil-rich area in Canada‘s Yoho National Park.But the fossil went mostly unnoticed until a few years ago, when evolutionary biologist Jean-Bernard Caron of the University of Toronto “stumbled on drawers full of these worms” at...

Roughly 150 million years ago, birds began to evolve. The winged creatures we see in the skies today descended from a group of dinosaurs called theropods, which included tyrannosaurs, during a 54-million-year chunk of time known as the Jurassic period. Why the ability to fly evolved in some species is a difficult question to answer, but scientists agree that wings came to be because they must have been useful: they might have helped land-based animals leap into the air, or helped gliding creatures who flapped their arms produce thrust. As researchers continue to probe the origin of flight, studies of...

Enlarge Image Whack here. By taking great care to eliminate possible contamination of rock samples -- including sterilizing the outer surfaces of rocks and then removing their outer layers to expose fresh material within—researchers found the strongest evidence yet that microbes live deep within the sea floor. Credit: Jesper Rais/AU Communication Samples drilled from 3.5-million-year-old seafloor rocks have yielded the strongest evidence yet that a variety of microorganisms live deeply buried within the ocean's crust. These microbes make their living by consuming methane and sulfate compounds dissolved in the mineral-rich waters flowing through the immense networks of fractures in...

A tiny, furry-tailed creature is the most complete picture yet as to what the ancestor of mice, elephants, lions, tigers, bears, whales, bats and humans once looked like, researchers say. These new findings also suggest this forerunner of most mammals appeared shortly after the catastrophe that ended the age of dinosaurs, scientists added.

Last year, the team drilled through almost 4km (2.34 miles) of ice to reach the lake and retrieve samples. Vostok is thought to have been cut off from the surface for millions of years. This has raised the possibility that such isolated bodies of water might host microbial life forms new to science. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," said Sergei Bulat, of the genetics laboratory at the St Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "We are calling this life form unclassified...

The huge ocean sloshing beneath the icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa likely makes its way to the surface in some places, suggesting astronomers may not need to drill down deep to investigate it, a new study reports. Scientists have detected chemicals on Europa's frozen surface that could only come from the global liquid-water ocean beneath, implying the two are in contact and potentially opening a window into an environment that may be capable of supporting life as we know it. "We now have evidence that Europa's ocean is not isolated — that the ocean and the surface talk to...

Explanation: Is this an alien? Probably not, but of all the animals on Earth, the tardigrade might be the best candidate. That's because tardigrades are known to be able to go for decades without food or water, to survive temperatures from near absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, to survive pressures from near zero to well above that on ocean floors, and to survive direct exposure to dangerous radiations. The far-ranging survivability of these extremophiles was tested in 2011 outside an orbiting space shuttle. Tardigrades are so durable partly because they can repair their own DNA...

Russian scientists believe they have found a wholly new type of bacteria in the mysterious subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica, the RIA Novosti news agency reported on Thursday. The samples obtained from the underground lake in May 2012 contained a bacteria which bore no resemblance to existing types, said Sergei Bulat of the genetics laboratory at the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics. "After putting aside all possible elements of contamination, DNA was found that did not coincide with any of the well-known types in the global database," he said. "We are calling this life form unclassified and unidentified," he...

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a... mythical creature? One Oklahoma man believes that's exactly what he managed to photograph. Craig Martin recently captured three images of an animal he thinks could be a Chupacabra, a legendary species rumored to feed on the blood of goats. The pictures show the animal feasting on the carcass of a dead animal, and even captures the face of the animal. To Martin, it's a match for the elusive prowler. "It looks exactly the same, there's not much difference at all," Martin told 2NEWS affiliate KFOR in Oklahoma City. While the scavenger does...

1959 memo lists government regulations for Yeti hunting. Really. If you're planning to hit the Himalayas in search of an Abominable Snowman, you better be ready to do things by the book. At least, that'd be the case if you were conducting your search in 1959. These days, if you head out in search of a Yeti, you'll probably get a lot of giggles and funny looks, but back in 1959, the American Embassy in Kathmandu was taking such expeditions seriously. In a memo issued on Nov. 30 of that year, the embassy listed three specific regulations for Yeti searches...

Researcher Claims to Have Shot and Killed a Sasquatch Nevada - (Ammoland.com) - Our regular readers will know that I love the story or idea that Bigfoots (or is it Bigfeets, as in more than one) could exist. So regular readers on AmmoLand never mind when we detour and take a break from all the serious news coverage to speculate on the idea that we have a giant man sized, wood booger, hunting the same woods as me and you. The recent gossip is, a controversial big foot researcher, named Rick Dyer, has shot a large bigfoot while filming a...

Russian Bigfoot DNA Analyzed By Scientists: Yeti Or Yogi? Bigfoot DNA is in the news again. Over the last three years, the Russian Bigfoot, or Yeti, was claimed to be a “towering, long-haired beast roaming the Mount Shoria region of southern Russia.” This potential Bigfoot has left clumps of hair in caves that scientists have just now analyzed. Professor Bryan Sykes of Oxford’s Wolfson Institute has led a global genetics project to test hair samples from possible Bigfoots. Professor Sykes told The Sun what he thought about this Bigfoot DNA: “The hairs did not come from a yeti. The American...

A new method of establishing hair and eye colour from modern forensic samples can also be used to identify details from ancient human remains, finds a new study published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Investigative Genetics. The HIrisPlex DNA analysis system was able to reconstruct hair and eye colour from teeth up to 800 years old, including the Polish General Wladyslaw Sikorski (1881 to 1943) confirming his blue eyes and blond hair.A team of researchers from Poland and the Netherlands, who recently developed the HIrisPlex system for forensic analysis, have now shown that this system is sufficiently robust to...