The human remains of 12 individuals have been discovered in a chamber in the well-known Petra in Jordan.Petra, one of the new seven wonders of the world and a UNESCO World Heritage site, was the capital of the Nabatean Kingdom, which lasted from roughly 400 B.C. until the Romans absorbed the Kingdom as a province in the beginning of the second century A.D.“Complete burial sites are not a common thing in Petra,” says Richard Bates, a geophysicist at St. Andrews University in Scotland who has ...read more

We often associate the word “caveman” with crude simplicity. But based on a new finding, maybe we should, instead, use it as a stand-in for technological innovation. Researchers discovered a new kind of fire pit dating back about 75,000 years. After analyzing its novel design — a ringed trench rather than a simple pit — and the traces of chemical components left behind by burning, they determined that Neanderthals used it to produce tar from rockrose (Cistus ladanifer). They then employe ...read more

The Grand Egyptian Museum has been in the works for over two decades. Construction ground to a halt during the Arab Spring a decade ago but the museum, which is set to fully open in the coming months, will be the largest archeological complex in the world, housing some of Egypt’s greatest treasures.Among the most impressive artifacts come from the boy king's tomb, the young pharaoh Tutankhamun, first discovered on November 26, 1922, by the British archeologist Howard Carter.Tutankhamun, whose ...read more

Tail clubs were rare a trait that didn’t survive past the Pleistocene, a period that ended about 11,700 years ago. The last species to have them were glyptodonts – large dome-shaped armadillos from South America, and extinct turtle species from South America and Australasia. Before this, only two species of dinosaurs had tail clubs: the quadrupedal armored tanks known as ankylosaurs and the long-necked sauropods. Of those approximately 250 sauropod species, only three were known to have tail ...read more

Superstition is all around us in today’s world, whether it’s the fear of walking under a ladder or encountering a black cat late at night. Many of these quirks and common practices that people follow unquestioningly are steeped in history, dating back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years to ancient times. So what are the origins of some common superstitions and their historical roots?  1. Conniving Crows(Credit: Stephen John Edwards/Shutterstock) Immortalized in today’s culture and ...read more

The human age we live in has impacted nearly all life on our planet. Some of the worst of these effects are the extinctions and extirpations of an untold number of species over the past few thousand years at an accelerating rate. The most recent wave of extinction has led some scientists to call our period the Anthropocene Extinction, along with the Sixth Mass Extinction. In the past, the giant Chicxulub impactor caused the end of the non-avian dinosaurs and many other lifeforms 66 million years ...read more

As cute as they are, baby otters are also highly demanding, and moms carry the load. Mother otters teach pups how to groom themselves, to forage for tasty morsels like shellfish, to crack them open with a rock, to dive and even to swim. Baby otters hang around their moms for as long as eight to 11 months, compared to the mere four to six weeks that sea lions spend in their mothers’ care.But what happens when juvenile white sharks attack female otters, mistaking them for blubbery pinnipeds? Or ...read more

The most disturbing thing about exploding head syndrome is when it hits you. Just in the process of drifting off to sleep, people suddenly think they hear a piercing, crashing noise.“It’s usually very short, very loud — like a gunshot or explosion,” says Dan Denis, a psychologist with the University of York in the U.K. “It can be pretty scary.”Many people have experienced this once in their life, and a smaller subset reported recurrent episodes, sometimes as much as once per month. E ...read more

On November 24, 1974, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray were riding in a Land Rover on the hunt for bones. It was hot and dry, and the two were tired from a long day of excavating fossils. As they coasted through a dusty gully, having taken a different route than normal, Johanson spotted the forearm bone of a hominid poking out from beneath the dirt.Uncovering the ulna would lead to 47 other bones, including a skull bone, femur, ribs, pelvis, and the lower jaw, all of them belonging to a young adult ...read more

New fossils provide the missing links between smaller, earlier flying reptiles and the later massive pterosaurs. Initial pterosaurs had wingspans of about 6 feet, while later species measured as much as 32 feet across. Paleontologists describe the fossil of the new species, Skiphosoura bavarica, in a Current Biology report.Splitting Flying ReptilesAlthough Skiphosoura appears to be about the same size as early pterosaurs, it holds some important anatomical differences. Paleontologists had long s ...read more