It would seem obvious that rising sea levels that cut off the last population of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island from the Siberian coast 10,000 years ago caused in-breeding, leading to their eventual extinction. But a new genetic analysis, reported in Cell, counters that claim.That result was unexpected, since an earlier report indicated that the mammoth population likely built up harmful genetic mutations, according to Love Dalén, a scientist with the Centre for Palaeogenetics of Sweden, and ...read more

Axolotls are perhaps the most instantly recognizable amphibians in the world. At once cute, curious, and infinitely fascinating due to their unique biological traits, these ever-young creatures capture the imagination. Axolotls are a type of salamander, endemic to Mexico and only found in two places; the waterways and canals of Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco around Mexico City. They are often photographed as seemingly grumpy or with a joyful, childlike grin. Their infinite likability aside, the ...read more

When Sydney hosted the 2000 Summer Olympics, an unlikely hero emerged: an unofficial mascot known as Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat. Introduced by comedians, it helped to kick off a wave of love for a critter not always adored by human Australians. Over the centuries, the native marsupial has been eaten in stew and maligned as a pest. Now, it’s a focus of conservation and animal welfare efforts.Wombats are closely related to koalas and nurture their young in pouches like other marsupials. Of the t ...read more

Every four years, the American Society of Civil Engineers produces a report card for the nation’s infrastructure that assigns grades based on the condition of structures like roads, bridges, and dams, and the investments that they need. Heavy rainfall generated widespread flooding. in the Upper Midwest in late June 2024, putting at least one aging dam at risk. In southern Minnesota, the Blue Earth River cut a path around the Rapidan Damin Rapidan Township, about 15 miles south of Mankato, on J ...read more

When most folks imagine the asteroids, they likely picture chunk of rocky rubble, maybe mixed in with some metals based on distant observations and flybys. They shouldn't be very complicated because they're just leftovers from the formation of the solar system. Most of the meteorites that have been sampled on Earth have a lot of the same basic minerals and elements as well.As it turns out, going out to the asteroid belt and directly sampling one of these primordial objects has turned that notion ...read more

Dating can be tricky. If your timing is off, it can result in misunderstandings. This is especially true in fields like archeology and paleontology. If an item is identified as hailing from an incorrect year, entire lines of research can be put into question. So when Sturt Manning, an archeologist from Cornell University, and colleagues received a radiocarbon date that didn’t appear to line up with the archeological evidence, they tweaked the dating technique and came up with a more definitive ...read more

For decades, the University of Michigan Library held an esteemed article. The precious paper was a letter penned by Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, which included sketches of Jupiter’s moons.The library acquired the letter in 1938 and considered it a prized possession because it was evidence of Galileo’s thought process as he worked toward his understanding that the planets revolved around the sun.But a historical detective sensed it was a fake and one of many manuscripts or documents tha ...read more

When you think about the word “art,” what comes to mind? A child’s artwork pinned to the fridge? A favorite artist whose work always inspires? Abstract art that is hard to understand?Each of these assumes that making art is something that other people do, such as children or “those with talent.”However, as I explain in my book “The Expressive Instinct,” art is intrinsic to human evolution and history. Just as sports or workouts exercise the body, creating art exercises the imaginat ...read more

The woolly rhinoceros, which roamed northern Eurasia for millions of years, is one of the most iconic extinct megafauna. The formidable thick-skinned, long-furred beast occupied the mammoth steppe, a cold-dry grassland biome that existed during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). However, roughly 10,000 years ago the woolly rhinoceros vanished. Scientists have been able to identify mummified carcasses of these animals, along with bone fragments, and several human cave paintings in Europe and Asia fe ...read more

A scholarly article once proposed that the griffin — a mythological beast with a raptor’s head, a lion’s body, and eagle’s wings — was created by ancient prospectors stumbling upon a dinosaur fossil while searching for gold in Central Asia.But something about the argument didn’t feel right to Mark Witton, a paleontologist at the University of Portsmouth in England, who with a colleague, now debunked the study over 30 years later in an Interdisciplinary Science Reviews article.The Pop ...read more