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 …
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham and his colleagues at the Harvard University in the US have found that tubers and the ability to cook them prompted the evolution of large brains, smaller teeth, modern limb proportions and the male-female bonding in humans. The observations challenge the current belief that eating meat spurred …
scientists working in a remote part of Ethiopia have unearthed the remains of a new species of an ape-like animal that lived around 2.5 million years ago, and some stone tools. They say the tools were possibly used by the first human ancestor to prepare meat , a dramatic evidence …
The ancestors of major animal groups may have existed 700 million years earlier than biologists realised. The fossil record suggests an "explosion' of animal life 530 million years ago, when many groups appeared. But a team led by Blair Hedges of Pennsylvania State University has traced the origins of nematode …
An American researcher and a Fulbright scholar Nina Jablonski, has claimed to have found a fossil of a hippopotami in Nepal, which is said to be around a millionof years old. Hippopotamus is a large mammal which is now only found in Africa. "We found the fossils in the east-Koshi …
Dinosaurs were tormented by parasitic mites, new research suggests. Dave Martill of the University of Portsmouth and his colleague Paul Davis used an electron microscope to study a well-preserved, 120 mil- lion-year-old fossil feather. The feather was found in Brazil and looks like a tail feather from Archaeopteryx, a prehistoric …
scientists at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Palaeobotany ( bsip ), Lucknow, have discovered a 3.2 billion-year-old fossil of blue-green algae in Singhbhum, north Orissa. They say that this could be the oldest life form in Indian geological history. The search for the oldest biological remains began in 1992. The …
THE fossil record of Neanderthals abruptly ends about 30,000 years ago. Why Neanderthals suddenly went extinct is a topic of much debate even today. Some experts suggest that they may have lost a "fight" with the more tech nologically- advanced Homo sapiens sapiens, while others say interbreeding with them diluted …
GREEK mythology can boast of some truly weird creatures. Centaurs - the furious half- man- half- horse warring class, Hydra, a three-headed monster and many more. But none is as frightening as the three snake-haired Medusa, one look from whom could turn people into stone. Well, as Mother Nature would …
IN A major discovery, paleontologists have found a vast dinosaur nesting site in Argentina. Thousands of fossil eggs were found at the site. Inside the egg fragments, the scientists found the first embryo remains from a major class of large dinosaurs, and first definite fossils of embryo skin from any …
A NEW look at a fossil discovered over a decade ago has strengthened the theory that bats evolved from flightless creatures that hung from tree branches by all four legs. Most paleontologists now believe that birds evolved from small ground-dwelling dinosaurs that had developed feathers for another purpose. The origins …
LIFE on the Earth was a result of a momentous event in the pre-Cambrian era (one billion to two billion years ago). Levels of oxygen rose in the planet's atmosphere, leading to an explosive development of life. But the increase in oxygen levels and its dating has always been somewhat …
IT is time to rewrite the history of life on Earth. A Calcutta-based geologist, Pradip Bose, has found convincing evidence from a site close to Churhat, Madhya Pradesh: The first multi-celled animals evolved about 1.1 billion years ago. This finding will stretch back the chronology of animal life by about …
THE evolutionary success of a particular group of organisms is judged by the number of different species in that group. But that is not the complete story, say palaeontologists in North Carolina, USA. Calculating the abundance of each species can reveal remarkably different trends. Most studies of ancient ecosystems involve …
The fossilized skull of Narmada Homo erectus was found embedded in a conglomerate bed in the Narmada valley of central India. This bed occurs at the basal part of a formation sandwiched between two other formations of 0.73 Ma and 74000 yrs BP. The conglomerate bed has also preserved fossils …
are scientists free from scientisation and cultural influence? Can they be completely objective? To be sure, scientists have acknowledged their personal limitations. Even great physicists like Newton and Einstein acknowledged it. But when it comes to placing our species in evolutionary terms, scientists along with the humanists have believed that …
Some say they never died, they simply flew away. Fearsome gigantic beasts that evolved into the myriad coloured birds we see around us today. Others are of the opinion that they were snuffed out by a hammer of the gods. Huge, mean and terrifying, they were cold-blooded lizards which were …
researchers have recently discovered 92-million-year old fossilised ants. With this discovery, it has become clear that these omnipresent insects have been on the Earth for more than twice as long as what was previously thought. Entomologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York found the ants in …
an asteroid that splashed into the Southern Ocean about 1,500 km southwest off the Chilean coast two million years ago has solved several mysteries of nature: why the fossils of land and sea mammals in deposits in Peru are all jumbled up, and why the fossils of the deep-sea diatoms …
