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Archaeologists think the earliest skeleton from the Malaysian excavation may be up to 16,000 years old.Archaeologists investigating caves in Malaysia ahead of their flooding for a hydroelectric reservoir have discovered more than a dozen prehistoric burials they think are up to 16,000 years old.The caves, in the remote Nenggiri Valley about 135 miles (215 kilometers) north of Kuala Lumpur, will be underwater if the reservoir fills as planned in mid-2027, creating a 20-square-mile (53 square km) lake to feed a 300-megawatt hydroelectric power station.Zuliskandar Ramli, an archaeologist at the National University of Malaysia, told Live Science that most of the...

Kamala Harris. Donald Trump. Gish Gallop. All three are expected at Tuesday’s presidential debate, even if most of America is unfamiliar with one name in that lineup. GG, as I’ve now come to call it, is a shell game/debate tactic that takes its name from Duane Gish, a prominent figure in the creationist movement who deployed dubious arguments, selective factoids, and rapid-fire lies to overwhelm his opponents in public discussions about the theory of evolution. The disinformation technique, coined Gish Gallop in 1994 by the National Center for Science Education’s founding director Eugenie Scott, is essentially the art of burying...

New research reveals that discrepancies between the locations where fossils are found and the areas where early humans are thought to have resided could affect our comprehension of human evolutionary history.A significant portion of the early human fossil record comes from a few key locations in Africa, where ideal geological conditions have preserved a wealth of fossils that scientists use to piece together the story of human evolution. One notable area is the eastern branch of the East African Rift System, which includes important fossil sites like Oldupai Gorge in Tanzania.Yet, the eastern branch of the rift system only accounts...

A den of 38-million-year-old snakes were found in the White River Formation near Douglas, Wyoming, have paleontologists super excited. They're among the most important complete fossils of snakes ever found. ======================================================================== Two of the three specimens of Hibernophis breithaupti, the 38-million-year-old snake from the White River Formation near Douglas. These snakes are members of the boid family, which includes modern-day anacondas and Wyoming's rubber boas. (Courtesy Jasmine Croghan) ================================================================== Around 38 million years ago, three small snakes slithered into a burrow seeking shelter from an apocalypse blanketing their world in volcanic ash. They never escaped, becoming entombed in the spot...

With 60 razor-sharp teeth and jaws so powerful they could crush a car, the King of the Dinosaurs would already have been a terrifying sight.But if that wasn't enough, the T. Rex may have been 70 per cent heavier than previously thought – weighing up to 15 tonnes – according to a study...The palaeontologists found that the largest known T. Rex fossils probably fall in the 99th percentile – representing the top 1 per cent of body size – but finding one would require excavating fossils for another 1,000 years...Meanwhile, a separate study suggests that the T. Rex may also...

Jade Simon, a professor at Laramie County Community College, was a critical part of a paleontologist team that discovered a new species of meat-eating dinosaur that’s best described as a giant 170-pound chicken from hell. A new prehistoric avian dinosaur, similar to this one, has been discovered. A Wyoming paleontologist helped verify it. (Cowboy State Daily Illustration) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When paleontologists found a drumstick from what can best be described as a 68-million-year-old chicken from hell, they needed expert on prehistoric hell chickens to confirm it as a new species. And they found her in Wyoming at Laramie County Community College....

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 face of an eight-year-old Neanderthal boy who died more than 30,000 years ago has been reconstructed by scientists who used a skull initially found in the Teshik-Tash cave in Uzbekistan in 1938. The portrait is the first three-dimensional restoration of a Neanderthal skull fossil, which reveals the young boy had a small, turned-up nose that sunk into his face. The fossil is the first Neanderthal fossil discovered in Asia and the only complete Asian Neanderthal skull fossil preserved so far....

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...

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...

Mammals from mice to monkeys have tails. But humans and our cousins the great apes lack them. Now, Researchers may have unearthed a simple genetic change that led to our abbreviated back end: an itinerant piece of DNA that leapt into a new chromosomal home and changed how great apes make a key developmental protein. The finding also suggests the genetic shift came with a less visible and more dangerous effect: a higher risk of birth defects involving the developing spinal cord. The work not only addresses an “inherently interesting question about what makes us human,” says Hopi Hoekstra, an...

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...

Neanderthals living in the Swabian Jura more than 45,000 years ago used sophisticated techniques with many different production strategies to make stone tools. The Heidenschmiede site has yielded many stone tools and by-products of the toolmaking process.The researchers refitted the pieces made from stone cores and were thereby able to show the techniques – requiring planning and forethought – used in the process...The Heidenschmiede, a rock shelter near Heidenheim in southern Germany, was discovered and excavated in 1928 by amateur archaeologist Hermann Mohn, who recognized it as an important site for stone and bone worked by early humans...The bone and...

In the rocky terrain of the Whitmore mountain range in Antarctica, there have been found fossilized skeletal remains of what seems to be extremely small humans. Interestingly enough, this discovery was made while yours truly was in Antarctica on assignment for The National Reporter to debunk a ridiculous tabloid story about a UFO base in the area.

Pterosaurs with these types of beaks are better known at the time period from North Africa, so it would be reasonable to assume a likeness to the North African Alanqa. Credit: Attributed to Davide Bonadonna ======================================================================= Paleontologists have made a surprising discovery while searching through 100-year-old fossil collections from the UK – a new mystery species of pterosaur, unlike anything seen before. Lead author of the project, University of Portsmouth PhD student Roy Smith, discovered the mystery creature amongst fossil collections housed in the Sedgwick Museum of Cambridge and the Booth Museum at Brighton that were assembled when phosphate mining...

The last 10 years have transformed the evidence concerning the early origins and evolution of Neanderthal populations. Genetic comparisons of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancient DNA suggest that the common ancestor of these populations separated from African ancestors of modern humans prior to 600,000 years ago, followed by a rapid differentiation in Eurasia. Later, additional episodes of gene flow brought genes into Neanderthal populations, including the mtDNA clade carried by all later Neanderthals. Yet, a number of western Eurasian fossil samples from the time between 600,000 and 100,000 years ago are difficult to accommodate within the category of "Neanderthals", including European...

Humans and Neanderthals More Similar Than Polar and Brown Bears BY JEFFREY P. TOMKINS, PH.D. * | SUNDAY, JUNE 28, 2020 A study led by Oxford University researchers was recently published confirming that Neanderthals and humans were very genetically similar and interfertile. They were even closer than polar and brown bears are to each other, which are known to mate and produce viable offspring in the wild quite easily.1 Along with a plethora of previous DNA studies, this research further confirms that Neanderthals were an ancient people group of the human family, descended from Noah’s three sons and their wives...

Recent Humans with Archaic Features Upend Evolution BY JEFFREY P. TOMKINS, PH.D. * | FRIDAY, MARCH 29, 2019 Ideas shaping the concept of human evolution have largely played out through images. Characters with large brow ridges and sloping foreheads—including Homo neanderthalensis and Homo erectus—have consistently been depicted as the earliest forms of evolving humans. Now, new fossil evidence is turning the whole paradigm upside down.