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Land-Dwelling Dinosaur Relatives Bridge Gap to Origin of Pterosaurs

Dec 14, 2020 by News Staff

Pterosaurs were highly successful reptiles that lived between 210 and 65 million years ago. They were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight, but...

An artist’s impression of the super-Earth planet TOI-237b. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

TESS Discovers Two Small and Warm Exoplanets

Dec 14, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) have discovered two exoplanets transiting inactive red dwarf stars TOI-122...

Professor Martin next to the Pleistocene iguana burrow. Image credit: Melissa Hage.

115,000-Year-Old Iguana Nest Fossil Found on San Salvador Island

Dec 14, 2020 by News Staff

A trace fossil preserved in the Grotto Beach Formation on San Salvador Island, the Bahamas, is the first known fossil example of an iguana nesting burrow. Illustration...

Detail of a circular mound village called Dona Maria with ‘twin’ village. Image credit: Iriarte et al., doi: 10.5334/jcaa.45.

Archaeologists Find Ancient Villages Laid Out Like Clock Face in Amazonia

Dec 11, 2020 by News Staff

Using a helicopter-based lidar mapping tool, an international team of scientists led by University of Exeter archaeologists has discovered a network of...

HD 106906b occupies an unlikely orbit around a double star 336 light-years away and it may be offering clues to something that might be much closer to home: a hypothesized distant member of our Solar System dubbed Planet Nine. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / M. Kornmesser.

Young Super-Jupiter Circles Its Binary Star Once Every 15,000 Years

Dec 10, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers are still searching for a hypothetical Planet Nine in the distant reaches of the Solar System, but an 11-Jupiter-mass planet called HD 106906b...

An artist’s impression of Thalassodraco etchesi. Image credit: Megan Jacobs.

New Ichthyosaur Species Uncovered in England

Dec 10, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

A new genus and species of ophthalmosaurid ichthyosaur that swam in the Late Jurassic seas has been identified from an exceptionally well-preserved specimen...

Beta-caryophyllene and caryophyllene oxide-induced horse manure rolling behavior of Ginny, the giant panda at Beijing Zoo. Image credit: Zhou et al., doi: 10.1073/pnas.2004640117.

Wild Giant Pandas Roll in Horse Manure to Increase Cold Tolerance

Dec 9, 2020 by News Staff

Wild giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) not only frequently sniff and wallow in fresh horse manure at low ambient temperatures, but also actively rub...

An artist’s impression of what the Milky Way might look like seen from above. The colored rings show the rough extent of the Heracles galaxy. The yellow dot shows the position of the Sun. Image credit: Danny Horta-Darrington, Liverpool John Moores University / NASA / JPL-Caltech / SDSS.

Astronomers Find ‘Fossil Galaxy’ Hidden in Depths of Milky Way

Dec 8, 2020 by News Staff

A small satellite galaxy, named Heracles, collided with our Milky Way Galaxy about 10 billion years ago and its remnants account for about one third of...

Life reconstruction of Agudotherium gassenae. Image credit: Márcio L. Castro.

Fossils of New Cynodont Species Found in Brazil

Dec 7, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

A new genus and species of probainognathian cynodont that roamed our planet during the Triassic period has been identified from two fossilized specimens...

This image of a sunspot was taken on January 28, 2020 by NSF’s Inouye Solar Telescope’s Wave Front Correction context viewer. The image reveals striking details of the sunspot’s structure as seen at the Sun’s surface. The sunspot is sculpted by a convergence of intense magnetic fields and hot gas boiling up from below. This image uses a warm palette of red and orange, but the context viewer took this sunspot image at the wavelength of 530 nm -- in the greenish-yellow part of the visible spectrum. Image credit: NSO / AURA / NSF.

Inouye Solar Telescope Captures Its First Image of Sunspot

Dec 7, 2020 by News Staff

An image of a sunspot captured by NSF’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope clearly shows the potential of the telescope and its set of state-of-the-art...

An artist’s reconstruction of ‘Anomalocaris’ briggsi. Image credit: Katrina Kenny.

Cambrian Deep-Sea Arthropods Had Complex Compound Eyes

Dec 4, 2020 by News Staff

A team of paleontologists from Australia and the United Kingdom has found that ancient deep-sea creatures called radiodonts developed sophisticated eyes...

Giant sloth drawing. Image credit: Morcote-Ríos et al., doi: 10.1016/j.quaint.2020.04.026.

12,000-Year-Old Rock Drawings of Ice Age Megafauna Discovered in Colombian Amazon

Dec 3, 2020 by News Staff

Archaeologists on the ERC project LASTJOURNEY have discovered spectacular rock pictographs in three separate rock shelters in the Guaviare Department of...

Data from more than 1.8 billion stars have been used to create this map of the entire sky. It shows the total brightness and color of stars observed by ESA’s Gaia satellite and released as part of Gaia’s Early Data Release 3. Brighter regions represent denser concentrations of bright stars, while darker regions correspond to patches of the sky where fewer and fainter stars are observed. The color of the image is obtained by combining the total amount of light with the amount of blue and red light recorded by Gaia in each patch of the sky. The bright horizontal structure that dominates the image is the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is actually a flattened disk seen edge-on that contains most of the Galaxy’s stars. In the middle of the image, the Galactic center appears bright, and thronged with stars. Darker regions across the Galactic plane correspond to foreground clouds of interstellar gas and dust, which absorb the light of more distant stars. Many of these clouds conceal stellar nurseries where new generations of stars are currently being born. Dotted across the image are also many globular and open clusters, as well as entire galaxies beyond our own. The two bright objects in the lower right of the image are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. Image credit: ESA / Gaia / DPAC / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO / A. Moitinho.

ESA’s Gaia Mission Releases Data on More Than 1.8 Billion Stars

Dec 3, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers from the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium released today the most detailed ever catalogue of Milky Way stars. The new data set,...

ASKAP conducted its first survey of the entire southern sky in record speed and detail, creating a new atlas of the Universe. Image credit: CSIRO.

ASKAP Radio Telescope Maps Nearly Three Million Galaxies

Dec 2, 2020 by News Staff

Astronomers using CSIRO’s Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) have mapped approximately 3,000,000 galaxies in the observable Universe. ASKAP...

Life reconstruction of the titanosaur from the Upper Cretaceous Adamantina Formation in São Paulo backcountry, southeastern Brazil. The animal was reconstructed based on associated saltasaurid specimens in the area. Image credit: Hugo Cafasso.

Cretaceous Titanosaur Suffered from Blood Parasites and Severe Bone Inflammation

Dec 1, 2020 by Sergio Prostak

A giant sauropod dinosaur that lived 85.2 million years ago (Cretaceous period) in what is now Brazil had an aggressive case of osteomyelitis in its leg...

Life reconstruction of Bagualia alba. Image credit: Jorge González.

Newly-Discovered Long-Necked Dinosaur Survived Early Jurassic Global Warming

Nov 30, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists in Argentina have identified a new species of eusauropod (true sauropod) dinosaur that lived 179 million years ago, just after the mysterious...

Falcatakely forsterae amidst non-avian dinosaurs and other animals from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar. Image credit: Mark Witton.

Cretaceous-Period Bird from Madagascar Had Sickle-Shaped Beak

Nov 27, 2020 by News Staff

Paleontologists in Madagascar have identified a new genus and species of enantiornithine bird that had a long and deep beak, a morphology that was previously...

Xu et al. present the first anatomical and histological evidence of tail repair with regrowth in an archosaur, the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis); the regrown alligator tails constituted approximately 6-18% of the total body length and were morphologically distinct from original tail segments. Image credit: Norbert Nagel / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Young American Alligators Can Regrow Their Tails, Study Shows

Nov 24, 2020 by News Staff

Young American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) have the ability to regrow their tails up to 18% of their total body length, according to a study...

This image from the Geostationary Lightning Mapper shows a superbolt-producing lightning flash over the southeastern United States on February 19, 2019. The lightning flash spanned several hundred kilometers and lasted nearly 7 seconds. Image credit: Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Lightning ‘Superbolts’ Are Real, Two New Studies Confirm

Nov 24, 2020 by News Staff

‘Superbolts’ are distinct from typical lightning flashes and can be more than 1,000 times brighter, according to two new papers published in the Journal...