Archival imagery from the Apollo 17 mission to the moon. The yellow box contains an enlarged area of the original photo in which three lights are visible above the lunar terrain US Department of Defense The US Department of Defense (DoD) released a trove of files on UFOs. The files include images along with government…
If you’ve ever wondered how geologists know so much about ancient beaches and shallow oceans — from the paleoenvironment to the animals roaming around, the seasonality of the weather, and even the time of day when the ancient scene was preserved — they owe it all to the sand particles bound together by microbes, forming…
In the lightless depths of the Gulf of Alaska, approximately 3,251 m (two miles) below the surface, a softball-sized golden object clinging to a rock left marine scientists and the general public equally baffled. Was it an egg? A sponge? Something altogether unknown? New research led by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History suggests…
CT scans of a decades-old specimen from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History show a new species of short-snouted crocodylomorph with unusually strong jaws, offering a rare snapshot of ecological specialization in the Late Triassic epoch. Eosphorosuchus lacrimosa (left) is disturbed by Hesperosuchus agilis (right) near a Coelophysis carcass at what will become modern-day…
A new genus and species of carnivorous herrerasaurian dinosaur has been described from an incomplete but well-preserved skull found in northern New Mexico, the United States. An artistic rendition of Ptychotherates bucculentus. Image credit: Megan Sodano / Virginia Tech. The new dinosaur species roamed our planet around 201 million years ago during the Rhaetian stage…
New trace fossil discoveries from the half-billion-year-old Cambrian tidal flats of Wisconsin at a site called Blackberry Hill continue to paint the picture of some of the earliest animals to set foot on land and what they might have been eating. The mollusk trail Climactichnites blackberriensis (Cb) presumably stopping to eat a scyphozoan (jellyfish) that…
Honeybees (Apis mellifera) are important ecological and agricultural pollinators. In the United States, beekeepers experience substantial annual colony losses, largely driven by parasites such as the mite Varroa destructor. In new research, scientists studied a hybrid honeybee population in Southern California, a genetic mix of Western European, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and African lineages. They…
Paleontologists have examined 289-million-year-old specimens of the early reptile Captorhinus aguti that preserve a covering of three-dimensional skin, a complete shoulder girdle and ribcage with cartilages, and — most astonishingly — protein remnants that predate the previous oldest-known example by nearly 100 million years. Captorhinus aguti. Image credit: Michael DeBraga. The move from water to…
WASHINGTON (AP) — March’s persistent unseasonable heat was so intense that the continental United States registered its most abnormally hot month in 132 years of records, according to federal weather data. And the next year or so looks to turn the dial up on global warmth even more, as some forecasts predict a brewing El…
Paleontologists at Harvard University have described a large predatory arthropod from the Middle Cambrian of Utah featuring massive three-segmented chelicerae. Named Megachelicerax cousteaui, this soft-bodied animal represents the earliest known member of the chelicerates, pushing back the origins of spiders, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and sea spiders by 20 million years. The surprisingly complex anatomy of…
