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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: * Fossilized footprints in Saudi Arabia show human traffic on the cusp of a subsequent ice age. * Like carbon dating, scientists use isotopes and context clues to calculate the approximate age of fossils. * These human prints were surrounded by animals but not hunted animals, indicating humans were just thirsty. ======================================================================== A uniquely preserved prehistoric mudhole could hold the oldest-ever human footprints on the Arabian Peninsula, scientists say. The seven footprints, found amidst a clutter of hundreds of prehistoric animal prints, are estimated to be 115,000 years old. Many fossil...

This new species, named Zavacephale rinpoche, lived about 108 million years ago (Early Cretaceous period). Young Zavacephale duel for territory along a lakeshore 108 million years ago. Image: Masaya Hattori Arecent discovery in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert has provided the most complete and oldest fossil of an iconic dome-headed dinosaur to date. This new species, named Zavacephale rinpoche, lived about 108 million years ago (Early Cretaceous period). Palaeontologists from North Carolina State University announced the findings on September 17, describing it as a “once-in-a-lifetime discovery.” It belongs to the group pachycephalosaurs — dinosaurs known for their unique head adornments, including domes...

Image credit: Gary Todd / Public Domain) When researchers digitally reconstructed a crushed skull unearthed in China, they made a surprising discovery, revealing features that could potentially alter the story of our beginnings. Researchers believe the skull, known as Yunxian 2, is approximately one million years old. This finding suggests that the lineages leading to modern humans and their relatives may have existed at least half a million years earlier than previously believed. The “Muddle in the Middle” The stretch of time between one million and 300,000 years ago has presented challenges for scientists studying human evolution. Fossils from this...

This beetle likely fed on fungi that grew in the Cretaceous forest. Credit: Enrique Peñalver ========================================================================== Amber from Ecuador has revealed 112-million-year-old insects and plants, offering a rare glimpse into Gondwana’s ancient forests. Researchers have reported the first discovery of amber deposits in South America that contain preserved insects. Found in a quarry in Ecuador, the samples are described in Communications Earth & Environment. This discovery captures a moment in time from a forest that existed 112 million years ago on the ancient supercontinent Gondwana, offering scientists a rare chance to investigate an ecosystem that has remained largely unknown. Amber...

The Burtele Foot with its elements in the anatomical position. (Photo by Yohannes Haile-Selassie/ASU) In A Nutshell * Scientists matched a mysterious 3.4-million-year-old fossil foot discovered in Ethiopia to Australopithecus deyiremeda, a human ancestor that lived alongside Lucy’s species but retained tree-climbing abilities. * The discovery shows human evolution wasn’t a straight path from trees to ground. While Lucy’s species evolved rigid feet for walking, A. deyiremeda kept feet that could both walk and climb, plus ate different foods from forest environments. * A juvenile jaw with distinctive teeth from the same site as the foot provided the missing link....

Apologist Wesley Huff is pushing back against renewed claims that modern technology has identified the location of Noah’s Ark, calling the latest findings “not legit” and rooted in “sensationalism and non-credible archeology.” The debate follows comments from researcher Andrew Jones, whose team at Noah’s Ark Scans says it has uncovered new evidence at a site near Mount Ararat. The formation, first identified in 1959, has long been the subject of speculation. Jones drew national attention during an April 22 appearance on Fox News, where he said scans revealed what appear to be man-made features beneath the site. “I do believe...

It was more than it was Kraken-ed up to be. An octopus the size of the Hollywood Sign might seem like a monster from Greek mythology. However, new fossil evidence reveals that massive “kraken”-like cephalopods ruled the seas during the Cretaceous period, possibly preying on massive sea reptiles and other so-called apex predators, per a study published Thursday in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This massive mollusk “had among the largest body sizes of all organisms in the Cretaceous oceans,” wrote the researchers, who hailed from Hokkaido University. Indeed, at 62-feet-long, this colossal octopus could grow up...

We’ve discussed many times the fact that humans and Neanderthals are so similar that Neanderthals provide no evidence we are closely related to some type of primitive non-human hominid. Now, a new pre-publication paper reviewed by New Scientist provides more evidence for this, proposing the radical hypothesis that Neanderthals are not only closely related to humans — they are descended from us!Michael Marshall asks, “Are Neanderthals descendants of modern humans?” He writes:Among the many other human species that once inhabited Earth, the Neanderthals are the most famous. They lived until relatively recently and in many ways, they were like us.Just...

According to a statement released by the University of Oxford, domesticated dogs were spread across Europe and Anatolia and living with hunter-gatherers by 14,000 years ago. Researchers led by Lachie Scarsbrook and Greger Larson of the University of Oxford analyzed genomes taken from dog remains recovered at Upper Paleolithic sites, including Pınarbaşı in Turkey and Gough's Cave in England, and two Mesolithic sites in Serbia. These dog genomes were then compared with the genomes of more than 1,000 ancient and modern dogs and wolves from around the world. "Not only has this discovery pushed back the earliest direct evidence of...

A new study reveals that tiny fragments of Earth's atmosphere are transported to and absorbed by the moon via gusts of solar wind and our planet's magnetic field, upending a 20-year-old theory based on NASA's Apollo lunar samples... This surprising case of cosmic cannibalism is thanks to supercharged solar winds and, more importantly, our own planet's magnetic field...Ever since NASA's Apollo missions first returned lunar samples to Earth in the early 1970s, scientists have been puzzled by traces of volatiles -- substances that vaporize at relatively low temperatures, including water, carbon dioxide, helium, argon, and nitrogen -- that they found...

A giant reservoir of "secret" fresh water off the East Coast that could potentially supply a city the size of New York City for 800 years may have formed during the last ice age, when the region was covered in glaciers, researchers say. Preliminary analyses suggest the reservoir, which sits beneath the seafloor and appears to stretch from offshore New Jersey as far north as Maine, was locked in place under frigid conditions around 20,000 years ago, hinting that it formed in the last glacial period due, partly, to thick ice sheets. Last summer, researchers went on an expedition to...

A massive meteorite impact struck Earth in the recent geological past, scattering molten rock across continents and leaving behind the largest known tektite strewnfield on the planet -- yet no confirmed impact crater has ever been found. This video explores the mystery of the Australasian strewnfield, a vast distribution of impact glass stretching from Southeast Asia through Indonesia and the Philippines to Australia and Tasmania. The scale, chemistry, and physics of this event prove beyond doubt that a large asteroid or meteorite collided with Earth around 788,000 years ago, making it one of the most significant impact events of the...

Researchers have retrieved samples of 1.4 billion-year-old air from ancient crystals and found something surprising about a supposedly “boring” time period. The team studied the gases and fluids locked in halite crystals (rock salt) from Canada, shedding light on the composition of the atmosphere hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs walked the Earth. It turns out the planet was sporting more oxygen than expected—at least, in that exact moment in time—as they explained in a study published last month in PNAS. Direct samples of air “The carbon dioxide measurements Justin obtained have never been done before,” Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s...

According to a Phys.org report, Victory Nery of the University of São Paulo and his colleagues suggest that fossils discovered at the site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia between 1999 and 2005 represent two distinct species. The hundreds of fossils in the group, including five skulls, have been dated to between 1.85 and 1.77 million years ago. Homo erectus is thought to have migrated out of Africa some 1.8 million years ago. Did other species migrate out of Africa as well at this time? The Dmanisi skulls differ from Homo erectus, do not all resemble each other, and...

Archaeologists have found the earliest evidence yet of fire technology — and it was created by Neanderthals in England more than 400,000 years ago. Neanderthals were the world's first innovators of fire technology, tiny specks of evidence in England suggest. Flecks of pyrite found at a more than 400,000-year-old archaeological site in Suffolk, in eastern England, push back archaeologists' evidence for controlled fire-making and suggest that key human brain developments began far earlier than previously thought. "We're a species who've used fire to really shape the world around us," study co-author Rob Davis, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum,...

MILAN (AP) — A wildlife photographer stumbled upon one of the oldest and largest known collections of dinosaur footprints, dating back about 210 million years to the Triassic Period, high in an Italian national park near the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympic venue of Bormio, officials announced Tuesday. The discovery in the Stelvio National Park was striking for the sheer number of footprints, estimated at as many as 20,000 over some five kilometers (three miles), and the location near the Swiss border, once a prehistoric coastal area, that has never previously yielded dinosaur tracks, experts said. “This time reality really...

This ancient fossil holds the oldest intact brain ever discovered, and it looks strikingly like that of a spider, © Credit: Nicholas Strausfeld Share this post A fossil found in southern China has revealed something scientists rarely get to see: the incredibly well-preserved brain and nervous system of a 520-million-year-old creature. It belonged to a now-extinct marine animal with big front claws and a body that shares surprising similarities with today’s spiders and scorpions. The fossil, part of the Alalcomenaeus genus, offers a detailed snapshot of early arthropod evolution. Researchers discovered that its nervous system, especially the brain and nerve...

A team of paleontologists from the United States, Canada and Argentina has analyzed the fossilized eggs of two different non-avian dinosaurs, Protoceratops and Mussaurus, and found that the eggs resembled those of turtles in their microstructure, composition, and mechanical properties. They've also found that hard-shelled eggs evolved at least three times independently in the dinosaur family tree. For many years there was scant fossil evidence of dinosaur eggs, and all known examples were characterized by thick, calcified shells -- leading paleontologists to speculate that all dinosaur eggs were hard-shelled, like those of modern crocodiles and birds. "The assumption has always...

It was in egg-cellent condition. Argentine paleontologists found a real diamond in the rough after happening across a perfectly preserved 70-million-year-old dinosaur egg during an excavation. “It was a complete and utter surprise,” Gonzalo Leonel Muñoz, a Vertebrate paleontologist at the Bernardo Rivadavia Argentine Museum of Natural Sciences, told National Geographic of the “spectacular” find. “‘It’s not uncommon to find dinosaur fossils, but the issue with eggs is that they are much less common.” The team of paleontologists was reportedly conducting an excavation campaign in the fossil-rich region of Río Negro, when they stumbled across the primeval embryo. While dinosaur...

Long before their teeth evolved to handle tough, fibrous plants, early humans were already digging up and eating grasses, sedges, and starchy underground foods.A new fossil-tooth isotope study shows this behavior began about 700,000 years before longer molars emerged -- revealing that behavioral innovation, not anatomy, drove the change...As early humans moved from the dense forests of Africa into open grasslands, they began relying on quick, reliable sources of energy. This shift in habitat led them to favor grassy plants, especially grains and the starchy tissues stored underground.A new study led by Dartmouth researchers reveals that hominins started eating these...