A 9-mile-wide asteroid smashed into a shallow sea off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago. Some 75 percent of life on Earth died in the aftermath (Credit: Mark Garlick)
Some 66 million years ago, a city-sized asteroid set fire to the planet and began what was likely the worst day in history. Decades of research have helped illuminate the actual impact. But scientists are still figuring out what happened over the years that followed.
Based on studies of the impact site, it&rsq ...read more
(Credit: Samuel Scott)
Buried treasure doesn’t just exist in the movies.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) recently announced new details of the discovery of the San José — a Spanish galleon carrying a treasure of gold, silver and emeralds that went down in the War of Spanish Succession in 1708. You could quite literally say that its cargo is worth a boat-load — valued in the billions of dollars today.
Gold Under Those Waves
The sunken ship was found off ...read more
The non-avian lineages were not the only dinosaurs to experience a Very Bad Day at the end-Cretaceous mass extinction: the avian dinosaurs, better known as birds, were also hard-hit as global forests were destroyed. (Credit Phillip M. Krzeminski)
It’s the most common caveat you’ll hear about the End-Cretaceous mass extinction: It wiped out the dinosaurs, except for birds which are, you know, dinosaurs. A new study suggests that the global die-off nearly took birds out as well.
...read more
This tree is not dead, despite appearances. It's alive and happy, and it's been clinging to this cliff in southern Italy since the eighth century A.D. Researchers invented a new dating method to figure out that the pine is the oldest known tree in Europe.
Gianluca Piovesan of Università della Tuscia in Italy and colleagues spent three years taking samples from trees to try to find some really old ones. On mountain cliffs within Pollino National Park, they found a few trees ...read more
Rosary, fir tree and bump-headed lace... you might think those classifications refer to different shapes of seeds or butterfly wing color patterns, or something else that inspires a touch of poetry. Nope. We're talking excrement.
Researchers working with hundreds of samples of fossilized feces — coprolites — from a site in Spain were able to reconstruct a rare picture of biodiversity within a freshwater wetlands system more than 125 million years ago.
Coprolites are not ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
