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Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth. An example of one of the microfossils discovered in a sample of rock recovered from the Apex Chert, a rock formation in western Australia that is among the oldest and best-preserved rock deposits in the world. The fossils were first described in 1993 but a 2017 study published by UCLA and UW-Madison scientists used sophisticated chemical analysis to confirm...

DENVER — Life on Earth got into the shell game more than 200 million years earlier than previously thought. Fossilized eukaryotes — complex life-forms that include animals and plants — discovered in Canada are decked out in armorlike layers of mineral plates, paleobiologist Phoebe Cohen said September 27 at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting. At about 809 million years old, the find is the oldest evidence of organisms controlling the formation of minerals, a process called biomineralization. ********* The mineral plates themselves are odd. Most modern microbes make shells out of calcium carbonate, but the ancient shells are...

In an extraordinary find, a team of Australian researchers have uncovered the world's oldest fossils in a remote area of Greenland, capturing the earliest history of the planet and demonstrating that life on Earth emerged rapidly in the planet's early years. Led by the University of Wollongong's (UOW) Professor Allen Nutman, the team discovered 3.7-billion-year-old stromatolite fossils in the world's oldest sedimentary rocks, in the Isua Greenstone Belt along the edge of Greenland's icecap. The findings are outlined in a study published in Nature, with co-authors Associate Professor Vickie Bennett from The Australian National University (ANU), the University of New...

The researchers trace the fossil record, which illustrates a timeline placing multiple species overlapping in time and geographic space. Their insights spur further questions about how these early human ancestors were related and shared resources... The 1974 discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived from 3.8 to 2.9 million years ago, was a major milestone in paleoanthropology that pushed the record of hominins earlier than 3 million years ago and demonstrated the antiquity of human-like walking. Scientists have long argued that there was only one pre-human species at any given time before 3 million years ago that gave rise to another...

Scientists digging in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores years ago found a tiny humanlike skull, then a pelvis, jaw and other bones, all between 60,000 and 100,000 years old. The fossils, the scientists concluded, belonged to individuals who stood just three feet tall — an unknown species, related to modern humans, that they called Homo floresiensis or, more casually, the hobbits. On Wednesday, researchers reported that they had discovered still older remains on the island, including teeth, a piece of a jaw and 149 stone tools dating back 700,000 years. The finding suggests that the...

Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neandertal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neandertals. Neandertals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes...

The species would have looked similar to modern rats but ranged in size from about 1.5 kilograms to five kilograms. Researcher Julien Louys said the creatures were probably herbivores and became extinct suddenly about 1,000 years ago. He said they were the largest known rats to have ever existed and acknowledged some people thought they sounded terrifying. "Most people seem to think that," Dr Louys said. "But I think they would have been, well not cute, but certainly they would have been fascinating to see them in the flesh." He said it appeared the rats were a popular meal for...

You may think your dog has an irrational hatred of cats, but their instinct to chase felines out of their territory might be more reasonable than you think. Fossils have revealed the two species have a rocky past after the introduction of cats to the Americas had a devastating effect on the continent's species of wild dogs. In fact, it is thought that competition from cats caused up to 40 species of dog to become extinct in the region millions of years ago.

Sometime about 220 million years ago, a meandering stream flowed here and plants grew along its banks. Something, as yet unknown, caused sediment to flood the area rapidly, which helped preserve the plants. Gulbranson splits open a grey slab of siltstone in the quarry to reveal amazingly well-preserved Triassic plant fossils, as if the leaves and stems had been freshly pressed into the rock only yesterday. "It's a mixture of plants that don't exist anymore," he says, "but we have some plants in these fossil ecosystems that we might know today, like ginkgo." On the one end are fossils from...

Erik Gulbranson, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, trudges up a steep ridge overlooking his field camp of mountain tents and pyramid-shaped Scott tents in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. A brief hike nearly to the top of a shorter ridge ends at the quarry, where picks and hammers have chopped out a ledge of sorts in the slate-grey hillside. Sometime about 220 million years ago, a meandering stream flowed here and plants grew along its banks. Something, as yet unknown, caused sediment to flood the area rapidly, which helped preserve the plants. Gulbranson splits open a grey slab...

Around 5,000 years ago, the island of Madagascar would have resembled a Sci-Fi novel. Strange, prickly forests, gorilla-sized lemurs, pygmy hippopotamuses, horned crocodile and elephant birds whose eggs were 180 times the size of what you'd find in your fridge today, all called the African island home -- that was until the humans arrived.

Two men discovered an ancient bison skull while scavenging near downtown Kansas City, Missouri, in mid-January. Mike Ruth and Dave Jamerson were poking around the waterways of the Missouri River, looking for artifacts, fossils, cool stuff like that, when they found what they first thought might have been a piece of driftwood, according to KCTV5. As they lifted the piece from the silt, they realized they had “something really cool,” as Ruth told the outlet. “I immediately thought bison,” Jamerson commented. The fossil was covered in silt and zebra mussels as they unearthed it, but came out of the dirt...

Scientists have discovered that the extinct megalodon shark was warm-blooded, as indicated by the isotopes in its tooth enamel. Their research suggests that the megalodon could maintain a body temperature about 13 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding water, a significant difference compared to other contemporary sharks. A killer, yes. But analysis of tooth minerals reveals how the warm-blooded predator maintained its body temperature. Researchers have determined that the extinct megalodon shark was warm-blooded, able to maintain its body temperature higher than the surrounding water. However, the energy needed for this temperature regulation might have contributed to the megalodon’s extinction...

Ancestors such as Eocene Hyracotherium exhibited foot structures resembling those of present-day tapirs, featuring four toes at the front and three at the back. Each toe was equipped with its own hoof and supported by an underlying foot pad.In contrast, contemporary equids such as horses, asses, and zebras possess a solitary toe, which is a remnant of the original third toe on each foot. This lone toe is protected by a sturdy keratinous hoof, while the underside of the hoof features a triangular frog that functions as a shock absorber.To unravel the mystery behind the lost digits, a team of...

Recreating the musculature of the leg and pelvis, the imagery supports the supposition that this part-time tree-dwelling hominin walked completely erect, like humans, but more than three million years earlier.Starting with human MRI and CT scans to map muscle pathways, Wiseman next focused on virtual reconstructions of Lucy's bones and joints, and then married up cues from muscle "scarring" on the bones.The resulting model shows how Lucy was capable of upright, erect locomotion but also possessed powerful leg muscles that facilitated her species' half-land, half-arboreal lifestyle. Researchers believe the extra muscle power in the legs – 74% of the total...

New evidence suggests that the famous fossilised human ancestor dubbed "Lucy" by scientists died falling from a great height - probably out of a tree. CT scans have shown injuries to her bones similar to those suffered by modern humans in similar falls. The 3.2 million-year-old hominin was found on a treed flood plain, making a branch her most likely final perch. It bolsters the view that her species - Australopithecus afarensis - spent at least some of its life in the trees.

Researchers announced Thursday that the timeline of Greece’s history needs to be pushed back by at least a quarter million years after a shocking discovery deep inside an open coal mine. Archaeologists uncovered the nation’s oldest archaeological site, which dates back at least 700,000 years. It is thought to be associated with some of our earliest hominin ancestors, according to The Associated Press. Although older archaeological sites have been uncovered in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, this is the first major discovery of this age in Greece, and may completely rewrite aspects of the nation’s human history. The...

If the claims are true, the behavior by Homo naledi—a baffling, small-brained member of the human family tree—would pre-date the earliest known burials by at least 100,000 years. An extinct human species that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago may have deliberately buried its dead and carved meaningful symbols deep in a South African cave—advanced behaviors generally deemed unique to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. If confirmed, the burials would be the earliest yet known by at least 100,000 years. The claims, made today in two research papers uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv, were also announced by paleoanthropologist...

Like the teeth themselves, under the right conditions the gunk on your teeth may survive not just thousands but millions of years in the grave. Isn't that good to know.Advanced dental decay and plaque buildup have been detected in Dryopithecus carinthiacus, a primate that lived in Europe 12.5 million years ago, suggesting it doted on high-sugar fruit. Sivapithecus sivalensis, who lived between 9.3 to 8.7 million years ago in Pakistan, was also apparently frugivorous. Analysis of ancient plaque has shed light on the mobility of Neanderthals and other hominins, as implied by dietary changes, and shored up the thesis that...

The sixth century historian Procopius, in both his History of the Wars, and The Secret History, mentions a sea monster--a gigantic whale--named Porphyrios that dwelt in the Bosporus Strait and the Black Sea, and which terrorized the shipping lanes around Constantinople for about fifty years, and which causes significant headaches for the Emperor Justinian & the Roman navy. Our information is fairly limited, but what can we say about this real life Moby Dick?SOURCES:The Secret History, ProcopiusThe History of the Wars, ProcopiusA Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, KaldellisPinned by The Historian's CraftPorphyrios: The Sea Monster that Terrorized the Late Roman Empire3:51...