In a dense Salvadoran rainforest, a conservation detection dog named Niffler was engrossed in a peculiar training exercise. Like a determined scavenger hunt participant, his mission was clear: locate carnivore scat samples that his handler, Kayla Fratt, co-founder of K9 Conservationists, had hidden along a trail. Niffler searched tirelessly for his target, signaling his find by laying in front of the sample, paws and nose framing it on three sides. This critical exercise was not just a game – ...read more
Archaeologists have recently confirmed that a Japanese society that prospered between roughly A.D. 200 and A.D. 600 on the island of Tanegashima modified craniums for mysterious reasons. While the recent paper explains that the modified skulls reinforced group identification and belonging, they may also have something to do with the local shellfish trade. The Hirota people clearly valued mollusks, as they lined their graves with funerary goods made from shellfish brought from hundreds of miles a ...read more
During the late Jurassic period around 150 million years ago, a small tyrannosauroid called Stokesosaurus lived in North America. This tiny carnivore had to keep an eye out for the much larger Allosaurus while hunting and scavenging.But by the late Cretaceous period, around 66 million years ago, Allosaurus was long gone and tyrannosauroids had evolved into hulking, ferocious top predators. Case in point: the infamous Tyrannosaurus rex.  For many decades, scientists could not find any North Ame ...read more
Wouldst thou … learn the secret of the sea?
Only those who brave its dangers
Comprehend its mystery!Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was talking about sailors in that 1850 verse, and it was indeed the mariners of ancient times who braved the uncharted dangers of the ocean, encountering mysteries aplenty.But they didn’t always fully comprehend what they saw. In a time when uncharted areas on maps were decorated with dragons and other mythical creatures, sailors of old likewise embellished th ...read more
One of the workhorses of in any biology lab is Caenorhabditis elegans or nematode worm just 1mm long. Biologist regularly use C. elegans to gain insight into topics ranging from embryonic development and aging to genetics and neurobiology. In 1986, C. elegans became the first to have its entire nervous system mapped out. This creature, it turns out, contains just 302 neurons with 7000 synaptic connections between them, the fewest of any animal. Scientists hoped that such a map — a connectome â ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine