April 21, 2016
Getting there and getting around Denver
“Denver International Airport is the best arrival point for exploring Denver and the surrounding area. A car is necessary to see many of the …
The EARTH archive
Paleo
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252 articles · Page 7 of 11
April 21, 2016
Turtle finds lower Altiplano elevation estimate
Rare turtle fossils uncovered in Bolivia suggest that, about 13 million years ago, the southern portion of South America’s Altiplano — the arid, …
April 19, 2016
Fossil leaves provide clues to ancient Australian habitat
Researchers have long thought that the scrublands of Australia developed over the last 25 million to 30 million years as part of a global trend …
April 18, 2016
China's Red Deer Cave people may have survived until the last ice age
In the 1980s, a collection of bones from very small hominids was excavated from a cave in southwestern China, alongside a number of bones from a …
April 18, 2016
Museums and exhibits in the Dinosaur Diamond
Price’s Prehistoric Museum The Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah, the western point of the Dinosaur Diamond, now affiliated with Utah State …
April 18, 2016
Making tracks through the Dinosaur Diamond
For more than a century, the Western Slope of the Rocky Mountains where the mountains descend across the Colorado-Utah border onto the Colorado …
April 1, 2016
Bat signals
Bats, the only true-flight mammals, first appeared during the Early Eocene after a period of acute global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene …
April 1, 2016
Inside an icthyosaur's brain
While the dinosaurs were busy ruling the continents in the Mesozoic, an order of marine reptiles known as the ichthyosaurs ruled the oceans. …
March 16, 2016
A long layover on the Bering land bridge
About 11,500 years ago, two infants were laid to rest side by side in a shallow grave 80 kilometers southeast of what is now Fairbanks, Alaska. …
March 2, 2016
Parasites of the Paleozoic
Parasitism — an ecological relationship in which one species benefits at the expense of its host — is common among living organisms, but as most …
February 19, 2016
Earliest Americans were wide-ranging wanderers
About 40 years ago, when the Monte Verde archaeological site in southern Chile was dated to 14,800 years ago, conventional ideas of American …
February 19, 2016
A jaw all the wider to bite you with
Tyrannosaurus rex is often depicted with its fearsome jaws wide open, but few studies have looked at how wide the Cretaceous predator’s gape …
February 8, 2016
Mammoths may have suffered from bone disease
The demise of mammoths, which went extinct by the end of the Pleistocene about 12,000 years ago, is thought to have been brought about by a …
February 5, 2016
Geologic Column: A Jurassic romance
For me there were two notable events in 1847. One was literary, the other scientific. The literary event was the publication of the first …
January 14, 2016
Gouges in the ground are best evidence yet of dinosaur courtship
Dinosaurs might not have been lonely in love, according to new research published in Scientific Reports. Scientists recently discovered the first …
January 8, 2016
Fossilized melanin reveals bats' true colors
Studies of pigments preserved in fossil feathers have changed our perception of how colorful dinosaurs were. Now, researchers have revealed the …
January 8, 2016
Rising Star cave hominid walked its own way
After dozens of human-like fossils were discovered in a cave in South Africa last summer, they were declared distinct enough to be classified as …
January 8, 2016
Ancient eggshells may reveal dinosaur body temperatures
Whether dinosaurs had metabolisms more like slow, cold-blooded reptilians or fast, warm-blooded birds has long been a mystery. Fossilized bones, …
January 7, 2016
Three new species of extinct baleen whales found
The evolution of baleen whales from toothed whales was gradual, with intermediate fossil species found that possess both teeth and baleen. Now, …
December 23, 2015
South African cave system reveals new early human ancestor
The Rising Star Cave system, near Johannesburg, South Africa, has never been extensively explored because of its complexity and extremely narrow …
December 23, 2015
Oldest marine turtle found in Colombia
A 120-million-year-old sea turtle recently discovered in Colombia is about 25 million years older than the previously oldest-known marine turtle. …
December 23, 2015
Unshelled ancestor fills big gap in turtle family tree
Turtles may seem like innocent creatures, but the uniquely shelled reptiles have long posed a problem for paleontologists. Shelled turtles are …
December 9, 2015
Volunteering to muck around in the mud
The Snowmastodon Project team pulled thousands of fossils out of snowy mud in a matter of months, a herculean task that would not have been as …
December 9, 2015
What happened here?
Why did so many animals end up buried at the Snowmastodon site? What happened to them? “We really struggled to figure out why there were so many …