During the Eocene Epoch, between 56 and 34 million years ago, West Texas wasn’t the desert it is today. Rather, the ecosystem would have been made up of closed canopied tropical rainforests similar to what we might find in places like Costa Rica today. It was rainy and damp with humidity you could cut with a knife.Many of the fossils found in this part of the world are preserved in the serpentine rivers that meandered through the forests in a landscape dotted with volcanic highlands. It was a ...read more

Walking is perhaps one of the most difficult maneuvers a living creature can perform. And turkeys have highly evolved muscular and skeletal systems that support an efficient mode of locomotion: the trot.Standing still, a turkey is in a state of stable equilibrium. Its center of gravity rests directly over its feet, with its muscles anchored to its skeleton, directing the turkey’s weight down below. While the turkey requires a small amount of energy to remain in balance, this is an efficient, l ...read more

Paleontologists analyzed a 170 million-year-old set of fossils collected from a road project in France and found them to belong to a new, massive underwater predator that stands (or swims) as the oldest-known creature of its kind.A group of local paleontology enthusiasts 40 years ago collected the fossils from a road cutting near Metz in Lorraine, France, and donated them to the Natural History Museum in Luxembourg for safe keeping. The bones remained there until recently, when an international ...read more

The Hittites wrote, and they wrote a lot. In their home turf of Anatolia around 4,000 to 3,000 years ago, Hittite writers recorded state dealings and decrees, myths, rites, and religious rituals. They wrote down the details of their diplomacy, their combat, and their commerce, and they described Hittite celebrations, all on the surface of scratched clay tablets, written in a script called cuneiform. Of course, the thousands of tablets that still survive today are some of the most important recor ...read more

Everyone cooking on Thanksgiving dreads the same thing: a dry turkey. Tough, chewy meat can suck the enjoyment out of a meal, which is why people might consider submerging their holiday bird in a brine overnight.The strategy has kept meats tender for centuries — even ancient Romans had recipes for making a tasty boar ham in seawater. Brining has likely earned its place in cookbooks through time because it’s one of the most effective tactics for ensuring the centerpiece of your meal is actual ...read more

Human-driven climate change is increasingly shaping the Earth’s living environments. Rising temperatures, rapid shifts in rainfall and seasonality, and ocean acidification are presenting altered environments to many animal species. How do animals adjust to these new, often extreme, conditions?Animal nervous systems play a central role in both enabling and limiting how they respond to changing climates. Two of my main research interests as a biologist and neuroscientist involve understanding ...read more

If you live in the United States, chances are that cashiers often ask whether you want to donate to a cause their employer is currently supporting. Organizations like Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America or relief efforts in Ukraine were among the causes retailers championed in 2022.You may be asked if you’d like to round up your total to the nearest dollar, to add on a small amount or to “buy” a shamrock, heart or some other token that will be dis ...read more

High-profile sports like football and soccer have brought greater attention in recent years to concussions – the mildest form of traumatic brain injury.Yet people often do not realize how common concussions are in everyday life, and seldom does the public hear about what happens in the aftermath of concussions – how long the road to recovery can be and what supports healing. Concussions are important to understand, not only for recovery, but also for the insights that the science of recov ...read more

The sun, at 4.6 billion years old, predates all the other bodies in our solar system. But it turns out that much of the water we swim in and drink here on Earth is even older. Up to half the water now on Earth was inherited from an abundant supply of interstellar ice as our sun formed. That means our solar system’s moisture wasn’t the result of local conditions in the proto-planetary disk, but rather a regular feature of planetary formation — raising hopes that life could indeed exist else ...read more

This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Science Sleuth" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Science has a problem: It’s conducted by humans. Many of these humans follow the rules and procedures outlined by the scientific method and conduct themselves with integrity. But as with any sector of society, there are bad actors who cheat to get ahead.In 1912, an archaeologist named Charles Dawson combined and altered pieces of human and ape skulls, ...read more