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Research by Dr. Christopher Noto and a team of paleontologists published this week in the international journal Palaios describes recently discovered fossils from the Cretaceous Period (145-65 million years ago) of Texas that show evidence of attack by a new species of giant crocodyliform (croc-relative). Bite marks on fossil bones provide a rare glimpse of predatory behavior that indicate this animal was a top predator that regularly consumed turtles and even ate dinosaurs... For most extinct species, scientists can never directly observe such predatory behavior. Paleontologists must resort to other, indirect indicators. Bite marks on fossil bone are a great...

What did Velociraptor have for dinner? Raptor skeleton discovered with bones in its gut If you lie awake at night wondering Velociraptor's favorite food was (and whether it tastes much like human flesh), you're in luck. For the first time, a Velociraptor skeleton has been observed with its last supper still filling its guts, and this little guy feasted on long-dead pterosaur. Paleontologist David Hone has published a new paper describing his findings in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, but for those who don't want to breach the paywall, he's also explaining them on his blog. This especially well preserved specimen was...

Instead, he maintains better era will start Dec. 21When the current Mayan calendar cycle ends Dec. 21, the world will not cease to exist, says a Mayan elder. "There is a lot of information of what is going to happen on that date. The scholars say that the Mayan calendar ends, the world ends. But we, as Mayans, don't know anything about that," Elder Miguel Angel Chiquin said speaking through a Spanish translator Monday night at Colorado State University-Pueblo. "The great teachings that our ancestors have left us over the centuries, the 21st of December, we will be moving over...

Hand axes, small handheld stone tools used by ancient humans, could have served as the first commodity in the human world thanks to their durability and utility. The axes may have been traded between human groups and would have served as a social cue to others, Mimi Lam, a researcher from the University of British Columbia, suggested in her talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting here on Feb. 18. "The Acheulean hand ax was standardized and shaped, became exchanged in social networks and took on a symbolic meaning," Lam said. "My suggestion was that...

If you come to downtown New Bedford tomorrow and happen to see the flag of Portugal flying in front of City Hall, it is because March 15 is recognized in Massachusetts as Peter Francisco Day, commemorating the Hercules of the American Revolution immortalized by the U.S. Post Office in 1975 with an 18-cent commemorative stamp: "Contributors to the Cause ... Peter Francisco, fighter extraordinary." Peter Francisco lived in Virginia since age 5, when he was found abandoned at City Point, now Hopewell, on June 23, 1765. Left there by Moorish pirates, he was kidnapped from his parents' backyard on a...

Little by little, the federal Department of Education appropriates ever more power for itself. (Never mind that the department might very well be unconstitutional in the first place.) Today, most public schools are dependent one way or another on federal funds. Those funds don’t come without strings — and, under the Obama administration, bureaucrats have tightened those strings considerably. Through the Race to the Top competition, the Ed Department enticed states with reward funds to adopt national standards. (Some state leaders — like Texas Gov. Rick Perry — turned down the funding, but they were the exceptions.) The common core...

Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time -- it was the Bronze Age -- humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps. The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder. "The stroke of brilliance was the wheel-and-axle concept," said David Anthony, a professor of anthropology at...

Ongoing hostilities in Syria are now placing the remarkable ancient monumental ruins of Palmyra in the line of fire. Since the violence that erupted in Syria nearly one year ago -- a war that has so far left thousands dead and become one of the world's biggest stories -- the damage to the country's ancient cities and cultural sites as a result of the conflict has remained largely unknown. One report to surface last week, however, tells the story of Palmyra, where residents say the Syrian Army has set up camp in a citadel that overlooks both the modern city...

“Bread and circuses,” the poet Juvenal wrote scathingly. “That’s all the common people want.” Food and entertainment. Or to put it another way, basic sustenance and bloodshed, because the most popular entertainments offered by the circuses of Rome were the gladiators and chariot racing, the latter often as deadly as the former. As many as 12 four-horse teams raced one another seven times around the confines of the greatest arenas—the Circus Maximus in Rome was 2,000 feet long, but its track was not more than 150 feet wide—and rules were few, collisions all but inevitable, and hideous injuries to the...

The earliest surviving Charles Dickens film has been found in the BFI's archive after sitting on a shelf for more than 50 years.The Death of Poor Joe, a one minute-long silent film based on an episode in Dickens' novel 'Bleak House', was filmed in Brighton in 1901. It is thought to be the work of the pioneering Brighton filmmaker G.A. Smith, a view that is backed up by the his wife's appearance in it. Smith was married to the stage actress Laura Bayley, who appeared in many of his films and plays the role of the young boy 'Jo' in...

The oldest animal with a skeleton has been discovered, a creature shaped like a thimble that lived on the seafloor more than a half-billion years ago, researchers say. These findings shed light on the evolution of early life on Earth, and could also help scientists recognize life elsewhere in the universe.

SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine -- Researchers have pieced together what's believed to be the first comprehensive map of the entire 3-mile-by-5-mile Titanic debris field and hope it will provide new clues about what exactly happened the night 100 years ago when the superliner hit an iceberg, plunged to the bottom of the North Atlantic and became a legend.

Brooklyn civic groups are leading a charge to discover the exact burial place of over 200 Revolutionary War soldiers killed at the dawn of the United States and dumped near the Gowanus Canal. “These are the men who allowed America to come into existence — it’s a question that needs to be resolved,” said Marlene Donnelly, a member of the Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus,... “The Battle of Gettysburg has an entire field put aside to remember it — and this one, we just don’t remember,”... The grave concern is that development in and around the putrid canal, a...

We report the discovery in Lake Cuitzeo in central Mexico of a black, carbon-rich, lacustrine layer, containing nanodiamonds, microspherules, and other unusual materials that date to the early Younger Dryas and are interpreted to result from an extraterrestrial impact. These proxies were found in a 27-m-long core as part of an interdisciplinary effort to extract a paleoclimate record back through the previous interglacial. Our attention focused early on an anomalous, 10-cm-thick, carbon-rich layer at a depth of 2.8 m that dates to 12.9 ka and coincides with a suite of anomalous coeval environmental and biotic changes independently recognized in other...

Ancient Greeks had a word for the people who lived on the wild, arid Eurasian steppes stretching from the Black Sea to the border of China. They were nomads, which meant “roaming about for pasture.” They were wanderers and, not infrequently, fierce mounted warriors. Essentially, they were “the other” to the agricultural and increasingly urban civilizations that emerged in the first millennium B.C. As the nomads left no writing, no one knows what they called themselves. To their literate neighbors, they were the ubiquitous and mysterious Scythians or the Saka, perhaps one and the same people. In any case, these...

Not surprisingly, these paintings attract tens of thousands of visitors every year. However, there is another aspect to this art that often escapes attention, but which is now providing scientists with fresh insights into our recent evolution. Instead of studying those magnificent galloping horses and bisons, researchers are investigating the symbols painted beside them. These signs are rarely mentioned in most studies of ancient cave art. Some are gathered in groups, some appear in ones or twos, while others are mixed in with the caves' images of animals. There are triangles, squares, full circles, semicircles, open angles, crosses and groups...

Bryan Sitch, curator of archaeology at the museum, said it now appeared the man had been beaten about the head, garrotted and then beheaded The head of an Iron Age man who died almost 2,000 years ago has been scanned in a Manchester hospital to shed light on how he died. Worsley Man is thought to have lived around 100 AD when Romans occupied much of Britain. Since its discovery in a Salford peat bog in 1958, the head has been kept at Manchester Museum on Oxford Road. The scans at the Manchester Children's Hospital have now revealed more details...

Tensions in Early American Political Thought Joseph R. Stromberg According to the eminent historian of political thought J.G.A. Pocock, republican theory (or "civic humanism") was the most significant current of eighteenth-century English and American political philosophy. In the form of "country ideology," republicanism gave "left" and "right" critics of government policies a framework and believable rhetoric for their arguments. The so-called "radical Whiggism" of the American Revolution was itself, on this reading, merely an extreme and consistent version of the republican ideas of the English opposition. From 1656, when James Harrington published a definitive statement of English republicanism in Oceana,...

When the going gets tough, the tough take accounting. When the job market worsens, many students figure they can’t indulge in an English or a history major. They have to study something that will lead directly to a job. So it is almost inevitable that over the next few years, as labor markets struggle, the humanities will continue their long slide. There already has been a nearly 50 percent drop in the portion of liberal arts majors over the past generation, and that trend is bound to accelerate. Once the stars of university life, humanities now play bit roles when...

In the last three months, we've been reduced to something like the ancient Athenian mob — with opportunistic politicians sometimes inciting, sometimes catering to an already angry public. The Greek comic playwright Aristophanes once described how screaming politicians — posing as men of the people — would sway Athenian citizens by offering them all sort of perks and goodies that the government had no idea how to pay for. The historian Thucydides offers even more frightening accounts of bloodthirsty voters after they were aroused by demagogues ("leaders or drivers of the people"). One day in a bloodthirsty rage, voters demanded...