A new pterosaur dubbed the "Cold Dragon of the North" is one of the largest ever. (Credit: David Maas)
(Inside Science) -- A new species of giant pterosaur has been discovered in the Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada, whose snowy, windy winters gave Cryodrakon its name. Based on the largest vertebra yet found of this species, adults may have possessed wingspans of roughly 10 meters (33 feet).
"That's an animal probably comparable to a giraffe in height -- more than 4 meters [13 f ...read more
Orange roughy live in the deep ocean, where they're often caught by trawling ships. (Credit: New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research)
Would you eat an animal if you knew it was as
old as the U.S. Constitution?
Scientists in New Zealand have aged a fish
called an orange roughy at between 230- and 245-years-old, making it
one of the longest-lived fin-fish on record.
The ancient fish was born in the late 1700s
— and then caught
in 2015 by a New Zealand com ...read more
This artist’s concept of a lake at the North Pole of Titan shows the raised features that inspired the theory that exploding pockets of liquid nitrogen may be forming craters, which become lake basins.
(Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Saturn’s moon Titan is a distant and frigid world, but it also carries intriguing similarities to Earth’s own terrain. Liquid lakes and seas dot its landscape, though the methane and ethane that fill them are a far cry from terrestrial water. Now a n ...read more
A skull from Sima de los Huesos showing evidence of blunt force trauma. (Credit: Sala et al./PLOS One)
From the scene, authorities recovered DNA, a stone handaxe and more than 7,000 scattered bones, including a bashed human skull. It was a case for the ages. But there was one complication: the events unfolded 430,000 years ago.
The evidence was unearthed by anthropologists beginning in the 1980s at Sima de los Huesos — the “pit of bones” — in Spain’s Atapuer ...read more
This is one of the Neanderthal footprints discovered at Le Rozel. (Credit: Image courtesy of Dominique Cliquet)
At first glimpse, it looks like the Neanderthals might have just vanished around the corner. Their footprints are engraved in the soft oceanside rock, like photographic negatives of their passage, seemingly ready to be swept away by the nearby ocean.
In reality, the impressions are around 80,000 years old, pressed into ancient sediments by a group of ancient humans and preserved ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine