Take a polar bear. Take a lion. Mash them together and chuck them in a time machine, sending them back 22 million years to what's now Kenya and you've got the massive carnivore Simbakubwa kutokaafrika. The enormous bitey mammal was identified only after researchers rediscovered partial fossils of it, forgotten in the backroom of a museum.
To be clear, Simbakubwa is neither a bear nor a member of the extended feline family, even though its name is Swahili for "big lion." Instead, the mas ...read more
Our solar system is a whopping 4.5 billion years old. And those earliest days were some of the most interesting for astronomers. That's when the planets formed, building from dust grains into the whole worlds that now populate our space neighborhood. But most of this material has been drastically changed since its early days – incorporated into planets, or baked by the sun and weathered by time. However, if we could find material that hasn’t been ch ...read more
Researchers say they've rebooted pigs’ brains four hours after the animals died. The scientists managed to restore some blood flow and brain cell activity to the dead animals' brains by pumping a protective solution through the tissue using a proprietary technology they call BrainEx. The brain was never alert and researchers did not restore consciousness, but the work could lead to new ways to aid recovery after trauma like heart attacks and strokes, the researchers say ...read more
Toothy tyrannosaurs and enormous titanosaurs may be the most dramatic dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous, but plant-eating hadrosaurs had the numbers. These widely-distributed animals, often called duck-billed dinosaurs, are among the most commonly found fossils from the period that stretched 66 million-100 million years ago. Yet the hadrosaur origin story remains a bit of a mystery. Today, a magnificent new find from Mongolia fills in some of the gaps.
Paleontologists unearthed m ...read more
During the last centuries of China’s Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1600 B.C. to 1050 B.C., ritual sacrifice was a well-oiled cultural phenomenon, rich and varied in its manifestations. Rulers and elites sacrificed animals and humans to appease spirits or the ancestors. Just as humans met their ends, dogs were often right beside them.
Now a study in Archaeological Research in Asia, published in March, shows that people from the Shang dynasty relied heavily on sacrificial puppies to acco ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine