Head lice reveal contact between modern and ancient humans
...have provided insight into recent human evolution, fossils remain the only available evidence for many archaic human species, but this is notoriously sparse, leaving the data open to multiple interpretations. In the open access journal PLoS Biology , David Reed and colleagues circumvent the lack of human da...Component of volcanic gas may have played a significant role in the origins of life on Earth
... we do not know how it occurred. The earliest fossils scientists have found are stromatolites--large clumps of cyanobacteria that grew in abundance in the ancient world over 3.5 billion years ago in what is now western Australia. These most likely evolved from some simpler life forms because, like all m...Ancient sea spider fossils discovered in volcanic ash
...llion years ago near Herefordshire, UK has yielded fossils of an ancient sea spider, or pycnogonid, one of the most unusual types of arthropod in the seas today. Sea spiders are soft-bodied arthropods, found widely in modern oceans. For two-centuries there has been a controversy about the relationship of sea...Emory study details dolphin brain evolution for the first time
... data previously available were a small handful of fossils that provided a very limited record. Marino and he...nt four years gathering the data and tracking down fossils at The Smithsonian Institution and other museums. A total of 66 fossil crania were scanned and measu...Humans and dolphins: If brain size is a measure, we're not that different
... previously available were from a small handful of fossils that provided a very limited record. Marino and her colleagues gathered data and tracked down fossils at the Smithsonian Institution and other museums. A total of 66 fossil crania were CT-scanned and me...Are museum collections of ancient life representative?
... of ancient life the biggest dinosaur, the nicest fossils of plants and bugs. Increasingly, researchers are ...nd abundance compared to the mollusks preserved as fossils in nature from these time periods. A bulk collection is "when you chop a cubic meter of sediment ou......, S., Yuan, X., and Knoll, A.H., 2000, "Eumetazoan fossils in terminal Proterozoic phosphorites?" Proceedings...nce, but if that is true, it might link the embryo fossils to the tubular coral-like animal." The researchers will slice open a hatched embryo specimen that ap...Plentiful fossils of dinosaur contemporary allow population study
...e Virginia Museum of Natural History has scores of fossils of Tanytrachelos ahynis, a 12 to 18-inch reptile t...e plentiful and nearby collection of Tanytrachelos fossils to study their preservation and population dynamics. Michelle Casey of Elk River, Minn., a master's ...Ancient marine invasion sheds light on diversity
... climate change on species diversity. "Looking at fossils can tell you something about the controls on globa...essor of geology, University of Georgia, looked at fossils similar to modern corals, clams, snails and brachiopods from 450 million-year-old fossil beds in the...Ancient creature fossilized by the bacteria that ate it
...cteria that scientists were unsure even existed as fossils that long ago. The first find answers one of th...ues used a scanning electron microscope to examine fossils of tiny arthropods they collected from Antarctica, and discovered that the arthropod fossils were ac...Ancient fossil offers new clues to brown bears past
...n 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, and old brown bear fossils are not particularly uncommon in Beringia. Between...less bottled up in Beringia. The oldest brown bear fossils south of Beringia, in areas like southern Canada and the northern U.S., are about 12,000-13,000 year...Dinosaurs in bullet-proof vests
...etwork decays, being replaced by minerals. 'In the fossils the pattern of the fibres can often still be traced, even after hundreds of millions of years,' Torsten Scheyer adds. Some armour plating is even more stable Palaeontologists divide the ankylosaurus into three subdivisions. The bullet-proof vest st...Poisoning solved after millions of years
...ge site; it is famous throughout the world for the fossils of animals and plants from a tropical landscape 47...n the possible cause of death. While examining the fossils the researchers became aware that the deaths must have occurred at the same time of year in differen...Endurance running may be key to evolution of human body form
... skulls dating back several million years, but the fossils of early humans at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology showed Lieberman and Bramble that neither the earliest prehumans nor the chimps that are their nearest relatives have a nuchal ridge. The scientists were struck by ancient human......ned 26 traits of the human body many also seen in fossils of Homo erectus and some in Homo habilis that enhanced the ability to run. Only some of them were needed for walking. Traits that aided running include leg and foot tendons and ligaments that act like springs, foot and toe structure that allows effi...New fossil may be closest yet to ancestor of all great apes
...older Morotopithecus and Afropithecus , but the fossils that do exist indicate that these ancient "hominoids" were more primitive than Pierolapithecus , Moy-Sol said. The relatively complete Pierolapithecus skeleton shows a variety of important features shared by modern great apes, according to t...Researchers reconstruct parts of the genome of a common mammalian ancestor
...ts to do this." Efforts to extract DNA from fossils generally have been disappointing because DNA molecules break down over time. "Ancient DNA decays faster than [science fiction writers] would like," said Haussler. After a maximum of about 50,000 years, DNA sequences typically are too fragmented to b...Science's Breakthrough of the Year: Salty, acidic soup could have supported life on Mars
...ke better use of scarce resources. Or, might these fossils simply be the remains of modern humans with small heads due to a condition called "microcephaly"? The debate is sure to continue into 2005. Human Cloning: South Korean researchers made headlines worldwide this year when they announced that they had...Holes in fossil shells show effects of competition and evolution
...e only 2.6% did in unstressed conditions. Pliocene fossils had edge drilling present in 15 of 23 (65.2%) localities. In striking contrast, none of the shells from the early Pleistocene, middle Pleistocene, or Recent showed any signs of edge drilling. These results demonstrate how extinction may alter competi...Anthropologists find 4.5 million-year-old hominid fossils in Ethiopia
...d seven other institutions have unearthed skeletal fossils of a human ancestor believed to have lived about 4...ve chimp-like hominids into more human forms. The fossils were retrieved from the Gona Study Area in northern Ethiopia, only one of two sites to yield fossil ...