Free Republic

A team of international scientists have discovered 240-million-year-old fossils from the Triassic period in China that one scientist described as a "long and snake-like, mythical Chinese dragon." The 16-foot-long aquatic reptile, called Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, has 32 separate neck vertebrae – an extremely long neck, according to the National Museums of Scotland, which announced the news on Friday. The new fossil has a snake-like appearance and flippers and was found in the Guizhou Province of southern China. Dinocephalosaurus orientalis was first identified in 2003 when its skull was found, but this more complete fossil discovery has "allowed scientists to depict the...

This video delves into the intriguing tale of Andrew Sarkus Mongali Enus, the largest land predator ever unearthed. Its discovery, nearly a century past, during an expedition in Mongolia, unveiled a creature of formidable proportions. Initially pegged as a member of the Mesonychids, a diverse group of mammals spanning small to large sizes, further scrutiny four decades later revealed Andrew Sarkus's true kinship with the Uintatheres, colloquially dubbed "hell pigs." The enigmatic nature of Andrew Sarkus is compounded by its solitary status within the Andrew Sids group, making it a challenge to reconstruct its full anatomical profile. Clad in fur...

The ancient forest displayed traces of early plants, with some believed to have existed during the time of dinosaurs. The region's cartography commenced half a decade ago, dating back to 2019. Researchers have discovered the planet's most ancient forest within a deserted quarry near Cairo, New York. Embedded in rocks dating back 385 million years, these fossils preserve the petrified roots of numerous ancient trees. This discovery signifies a pivotal moment in Earth's timeline. As trees developed these roots, they played a crucial role in extracting carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, sequestering it and triggering a significant transformation in...

The longest core of rock ever extracted from beneath Greenland’s thick ice could hold clues about how quickly the island’s frozen covering will melt as the planet warms.Preliminary analysis of the rock and associated sediment suggests that, at some time in the past three million years or so, the material in this core was exposed to air. That means that the ice atop it had melted away, at least temporarily.The work adds to a small but growing cadre of studies that use Greenland’s bedrock to illuminate how unstable the overlying ice has been in the past…Using the latest equipment, the...

Around 120 million years ago, four-winged dinosaurs roughly the size of crows called Microraptors stalked the ancient woodlands of what is now China.While researchers have studied several Microraptor specimens, there's still a lot we don't know about these feathered bird-like creatures – including what and how they ate.Now an incredibly rare fossil has revealed the preserved final meal of one individual: and unexpectedly, it was a mammal...The first Microraptor fossil was found in Liaoning, China, in 2000. There are three known species, which lived in the early Cretacious period, and the fossil in question belongs to Microraptor zhaoianus...The Microraptors were...

On the small island of Minorca, a popular European tourist destination, researchers have unearthed an enormous fossil rabbit skeleton. A recent study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology highlights this new find off the coast of Spain. This massive rabbit, aptly named the Minorcan King of the Rabbits (Nuralagus rex), weighed in at 12 kg (26.4 lbs)! — approximately ten times the size of its extinct mainland cousin (Alilepus sp.) and six times the size of the living European rabbit, Oryctolagus cuniculus...The rabbit king lived approximately 3-5 million years ago and may be one of the oldest known cases...

We know that colliding two particles in empty space can sometimes cause additional particles to emerge. There are even theories that a strong enough electromagnetic field could create matter and antimatter out of nothing itself. Big Think reports, in early 2022, a group of researchers created strong enough electric fields in their laboratory to level the unique properties of a material known as graphene. With these fields, the researchers were able to enable the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. This proved that creating matter from nothing is indeed possible, a theory first proposed by Julian Schwinger,...

The fossilized skeleton of a T. rex relative that roamed the earth about 76 million years ago will be auctioned in New York this month, Sotheby’s announced Tuesday. The Gorgosaurus skeleton will highlight Sotheby’s natural history auction on July 28, the auction house said. The Gorgosaurus was an apex carnivore that lived in what is now the western United States and Canada during the late Cretaceous Period. It predated its relative the Tyrannosaurus rex by 10 million years. The specimen being sold was discovered in 2018 in the Judith River Formation near Havre, Montana, Sotheby’s said. It measures nearly 10...

“Genyornis was two meters tall and 200 kilos. We don’t know exactly what it would have looked like because it’s been dead for a while and there are few skeletal remains available. It was certainly a flightless bird with some characteristics shared with ostriches, like the big chest and small wings, but it would have looked more like a big goose or duck,” The evidence that humans were eating these large eggs comes from burnt eggshells found among the remains of ancient cultures. Scientists studying these sites find two different types of eggshells, one of which comes from emus and...

Proteins extracted from fragments of prehistoric eggshell found in the Australian sands confirm that the continent’s earliest humans consumed the eggs of a two-metre tall bird that disappeared into extinction over 47,000 years ago.Burn marks discovered on scraps of ancient shell several years ago suggested the first Australians cooked and ate large eggs from a long-extinct bird – leading to fierce debate over the species that laid them.Now, an international team led by scientists from the universities of Cambridge and Turin have placed the animal on the evolutionary tree by comparing the protein sequences from powdered egg fossils to those...

Entombed in a limestone shelf of South Africa’s Rising Star Cave, the fragmented skull of a Homo naledi child has suggested that the prehistoric species may have been more similar to modern humans than previously thought. Two new studies, published this week in the journal PaleoAnthropology, have revealed new details about the mysterious Homo naledi people, based on a set of fossils first discovered in 2017, which are believed to be that of a young Homo naledi of 4- to 6-years-old. An international team of researchers has estimated the child would have lived between 236,000 and 335,000 years ago, before...

The study, led by scientists at the University of Bath and including collaborators from Bristol, Cambridge and Germany, used fossils and analysed genetic differences between modern snakes to reconstruct snake evolution. The analyses helped to pinpoint the time that modern snakes evolved.Their results show that all living snakes trace back to just a handful of species that survived the asteroid impact 66 million years ago, the same extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.The authors argue that the ability of snakes to shelter underground and go for long periods without food helped them survive the destructive effects of the impact. In...

If you'd been able to stare at Earth from space during the late Cretaceous, when Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops roamed, it would've looked like the whole planet had tipped over on its side. According to a new study, Earth tilted by 12 degrees about 84 million years ago.... The researchers found that, between 86 and 79 million years ago, the crust and mantle had rotated around Earth's outer core and back again — causing the entire planet to tilt and then right itself like a roly-poly toy.... ...Prior to the late Cretaceous, the Pacific Plate — the largest tectonic plate...

SHAME ON you for publishing two creationist op-eds in two years from the Discovery Institute, a well-funded propaganda factory that aims to sow confusion about evolution. Virtually no scientist takes “intelligent design’’ seriously, and in the famous Dover, Pa., trial in 2005, a federal court ruled that it is religion in disguise. The judge referred to the theory’s “breathtaking inanity,’’ which is a fine description of Stephen Meyer’s July 15 op-ed “Jefferson’s support for intelligent design.’’ Well, yes, Thomas Jefferson died 33 years before Darwin published “The Origin of Species.’’ And Meyer’s idea that the DNA code implies a code...

Biologically speaking, many animals besides dogs bark, according to Kathryn Lord at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but the evolutionary biologist also says domestic dogs vocalize in this way much more than birds, deer, monkeys and other wild animals that use barks. The reason is related to dogs 10,000-year history of hanging around human food refuse dumps, she suggests.....she and colleagues say barking is the auditory signal associated with an evolved behavior known as mobbing, a cooperative anti-predator response usually initiated by one individual who notices an approaching intruder. A dog barks because she feels an internal conflict an urge...

The most complete skeleton of a type of pot-bellied dinosaur, a therizinosaur, has been discovered in southern Utah. Such remains shed light on the evolution of leafy and meaty diets back in paleo times, suggesting that iconic predators like Velociraptor may have evolved from less fearsome plant-eating ancestors. The newly discovered dinosaur, dubbed Nothronychus graffami, lived some 93 million years ago. When alive, the animal would have stood at 13 feet (4 meters) and sported a beaked mouth and forelimbs tipped with 9 inch- (22 cm)-long sickle claws. Its stumpy legs, large gut and other features suggest the lumbering giant...