The mode and tempo of extinctions and extirpations after the first contact phase of human settlements is a widely debated topic. As the last major landmass to be settled by humans, New Zealand offers a unique lens through which to study interactions of people and biota. By analyzing ancient DNA …
The rich and famous frequently change the medium they use to make a statement. If today it is a collection of Impressionist masters, tomorrow it can be a large family of adopted children collected from different cultures. Displaying a definite taste for the bizarre, moneyed collectors are now flocking fossil …
For the first time, scientists have discovered dinosaur footprints made some 150 million years ago on the bedrock of the Arabian Peninsula. Found near the village of Mdar in Yemen, these tracks are made by a herd of 11 sauropods
Scientists have discovered the tracks of a herd of 11 long-necked sauropods walking along a coastal mudflat in what is now the Republic of Yemen, the first discovery of dinosaur footprints on the Arabian peninsula. Sauropods, the largest land animals in earth's history, walked on four stout legs and ate …
discovery of a giant frog in Madagascar has challenged certain geological assumptions. The frog's (Beelzebufo ampigna) presence there lends credence to the contested theory that there was a land bridge between South America and Madagascar via Antarctica during the Late Cretaceous Period (65 to 70 million years ago), says paleontologist …
A fossilised jawbone and teeth found in a cave in northern Spain may have belonged to one of the first human ancestors to set foot in western Europe. The hominid has been identified as Homo antecessor, or pioneer man, a possible ancestor of both our own species and Neanderthals. The …
Climate change drove woolly mammoths to the edge of extinction and then humans finished them off, according to a Spanish study that adds to the debate over the demise of the Ice Age behemoths. Using climate models and fossil remains, the researchers determined that warming temperatures had so shrunk the …
A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say. The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, …
THE Oil and Natural Gas Corporation's Golden Jubilee Museum located in Dehra Dun is a big hit with schoolchildren and tourists. Children get excited when they enter the section in the museum that has four aquariums depicting the scenes of one of the frontier areas of the ONGC's operation
Dinosaurs might have known a surprising amount about what we think of as a quintessentially modern problem: global warming. Fossilised vegetation from 65 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period, reveals that central Siberia was a lot like modern-day Florida, with lush ferns and lots of rain.
A frog the size of a bowling ball, with heavy armour and teeth, lived among dinosaurs millions of years ago. It was intimidating enough for the scientists who unearthed its fossils, to name the beast Beelzebufo, or Devil Toad. But its size, 4.54 kilograms and 40.64 centimetres long, is not …
In a research by paleoceanographer Andre Bornemann of Leipzig University in Germany and his colleagues analyzed apparently unaltered Foraminifera picked from sediment core drilled from Demerara Rise beneath the western equatorial Atlantic. Following a classic technique, the researchers measured oxygen isotopes in the forams' shells. They found a sharp shift …
>> Researchers have unearthed the mummy of a 67-million-year-old hadrosaur from South Dakota in the US. A high-resolution CT scan of the 10-tonne fossil shows that the well-preserved body has much of its tissue intact inside an envelope of skin. The scanning shows the hadrosaur's tail vertebrae are spaced farther …
A 10-million-year-old jaw bone recently unearthed in Kenya may have belonged to a new species, which is the last common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees and humans. A team of researchers from Kenya and Japan found the jaw fragment in volcanic mud flow deposits in northern Kenya. The jaw, with incisor, …
This is one of 1,500 skeletons of bubonic plague victims, whose mass grave was recently discovered on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, in Italy's Venetian Lagoon. When the disease struck Venice in the 15th and 16th centuries, anthropologists say, everyone sick or showing symptoms of plague were quarantined on the …
When the French naturalist, Henri Mouhot rediscovered the sprawling Khmer temple complex in Cambodia's rainforest in 1861, he exclaimed, "Grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome.' I too was awestruck on seeing the Angkor temples early this year and realised that Mouhot was not exaggerating. The layout …
Diganta Narzary, a scientist at the National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow, discovered a dinosaur egg fossil at Assam's Manas National Park in October 2006. amarjyoti borah talks to him about the importance of the discovery in terms of the geology of north-eastern India The discovery The egg is 30-cm long, …
Chilean scientists recently identified fossils of whales believed to have died around five million years ago. The fossils were discovered a month back by some teenagers while on a field trip near Los Maitenes village, about 160 km from the capital Santiago. They found jawbones, backbones and ribs of four …
chinese researchers have unearthed a massive dinosaur fossil from the Iren Dabasu Formation of Nei Mongol in China.According to the researchers, the giant dinosaur belongs to a family of bird-like dinosaursoviraptors. The discovery is set to challenge the evolutionary theory described earlier. Reason: the oviraptors rarely exceeded 40 kg in …
The recent discovery of the remains of a dodo in the island of Mauritius has provided some more clues about the extinct flightless bird. The skeleton has been nicknamed
