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 …
WITH the recent finding of a rare dinosaur fossil, scientists at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are trying to create a sound that may resemble the call of the dinosaur. Sounds of roars, screeches and grunts of celluloid dinosaurs have been dismissed by palaeontologists as mere works …
Even though the discovery of the 80 million-year-old dinosaur fossil in the Gobi desert of Mongolia - by fossil-hunters from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences -shows the animal sitting on its nest of eggs, its original name of Oviraptor or …
THIS is a delightful portrait of the now' extinct Ursus spelaues, largest of the bear family. Known to have coexisted with the Neanderthal human and later, with humans of our own spe Icies during the later part of the Ice Age, the cave bear survived to, or even beyond the …
THE mystery of origin and evolution of life has boggled many minds and provided inspiration to several theories. But none - excepting perhaps the biblical account - has succeeded as famously as Charles Darwin"s masterly enunciation of the logic of life. The central idea of Darwin"s story of life is …
Yet another challenge to Darwin's dogma comes from worthless stretches of DNA- JUNK DNA -or introns. Most evolutionary theorists see the history of life as a progression from spineless blobs to that most exalted of creatures -ourselves. Obviously then, the notion that bacteria might in some way be more advanced …
Anything that evolves in contradiction to the twin engines of random mutation and natural selection is a potential threat to Darwin's theory. John Cairns, a Harvard University geneticist, discovered just such a contradiction in 1988. He found that some of the mutations in the bacterium E coli seemed to be …
INSECTS, today make up the vast majority of living organisms. Although insects appeared almost 350 million years ago, they really began to diversify only after flowering plants came on the scene about 150 million years ago. The catalytic role played by flowering plants in the diversification of insects stems from …
The largest and one of the most well preserved fossil specimens of an ammonite has been discovered on Seymour Island off Antarctica. Belonging to the class Molluscs, these animals have soft bodies like snails encased in calcareous shells (Discovery Vol 16, No 9). Called Diplomoceras ntsudmum, this animal belonged to …
If the Jurassic Park was to be filmed again, the story would not revolve around T-rex (Tyrannosaurus rex), but around Gigantosaurus mrolini. The latest addition to the dinosaur fossil&, G carolini is the largest carnivorous dinosaur to walk the earth. The remains were discovered by fossil hunter Ruben Carolini in …
ASIA, not Africa, was the home of the first simians. A.group of Chinese scientists working with the Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Sciences claim that they have discovered evidence at Shanghuang town in eastern Jiangsu province which pushes the history of simians back by 8 to 10 million years compared with …
Phillip Tobias, head of the anthropology department at Witwatersrand University, with his discovery: primate bones dating from 3.5 million years ago, marking a crucial transition stage in foot structure between apes and humans. Prehensile feet enabled the pre-human Australopithecus to climb trees efficiently as well as walk on its 2 …
They may have rid themselves of the shackles of the oppressive apartheid regime, but freedom apparently still manages to elude the Blacks of South Africa. They have, in fact, been invaded and held captive by a dead lier foe: the AIDS virus. According to a recent study conducted by the …
A NEW discovery has challenged the age- old belief that flowers came before bees. While the earliest angiosperms, or flowering plants, came into existence about 120 million years ago, the oldest known fossil of a bee is a specimen nearly 80 million years old, found trapped in amber from what …
Dinosours, like Vincent Van Gogh, found few takers in their lifetime. Now removed from the face of the earth...again, like Van Gogh...they are raking in millions. For the last 2 years, locals in northeastern Thailand are stripping unguarded excavation sites and selling fossilised dinosaur bone as the best cureall since …
Geologists have found in Mexico the filssil remains of a multicellular organism which is believed to have lived about 15 million years before the oldest known. The organism, resembling small jellyfish, lived an estimated 590 million years ago, said the lead researcher, Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.
A FOSSILISED jaw of Homo erectus-modern man's closest ancestor has been traced in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, could be the oldest ever found outside Africa. It has been generally believed that Africa is the evolutionary home of humans, with the Homo erectus developing from proto-human species. The new …
Scientists have discovered living fossils -- 23 adult and 16 juvenile historic (how old?) pine plants -- in an inaccessible region of the Wollemi National Park, Blue Mountain region, 200 km west of Sydney. The exact location of the trees has not been disclosed in order to protect them. The …
For creatures that were supposed to have dominated the entire planet, dinosaur fossils have been singularly missing from Africa. But now palaeontologist Paul Sereno from the University of Chicago claims that he has disinterred from Algeria and Niger fossils of several dinosaur species, among them 2 previously unknown -- a …
THE last of the woolly mammoths -- an ancient elephant look-alike -- disappeared somewhere in Siberia around 10,000 years ago. This widely accepted fact was challenged last year when new fossil finds from Wrangel island in the Arctic Ocean suggested a miniature version of the mammoth was very much around …
WHAT do whales have in common with pigs, deer and hippos? All of them share the same ancestors, say evolutionary biologists. This belief has been held for a long time, but now, two groups of palaeontologists working in Pakistan have discovered fossils that are up to 52-million-year-old to support the …
