For thousands of years now, mammals have held dominion over the land. But it wasn’t always this way. According to a new paper, early mammals evolved before a massive asteroid hit the planet 66 million years ago and therefore lived briefly in the shadow of the dinosaurs.These hard-scrabble animals included the earliest relatives of humans, dogs, rabbits, cats and any mammal that gives birth with a placenta. They survived until an asteroid marked the end of the Cretaceous Period and the reign of ...read more
In North America, skinks are often tiny, slick and snakelike — with shiny blue tails or bright red heads. Nearly all of them can fit in the palm of your hand. But more than 47,000 years ago, an armored tank of a skink walked the desert lands of Australia.“It was nicknamed ‘megachunk’ or ‘chunksaurus,’” due to the thickness of its bones, says Kailah Thorn, a paleontologist at the Western Australia Museum who recently described the species for the first time. “It’s a pretty heavy ...read more
If you ask a kindergarten class to draw a rhinoceros, you’ll probably get an amusing variety of artistic renditions. One feature, however, will likely remain constant: a majestic horn adorning its head, defining the rhino's distinct silhouette.Yet, in the wild, this iconic horn is disappearing – faster than rhinos in some cases.In the ongoing battle to protect endangered rhino populations from poaching, conservationists employ a controversial practice known as “dehorning.” This process r ...read more
In 2017, Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum, pointed a magnifying lens at a 1.45 million-year-old tibia and saw a series of neat slashes. The bone belonged to the National Museums of Kenya in Nairobi, where Pobiner had gone to look for animal tooth marks on ancient hominin bones. While researchers generally assume that animals killed and ate our ancient ancestors, relatively little evidence has ever come to light.But this was a different kind of evidence, as ...read more
If you took our whole planet and ground it up into a powder, then analysed that powder for its elemental composition, what would you find? A third of the powder would be iron, another third would be oxygen. Of the remaining ~35%, 30% of it is magnesium and silicon. Most people would guess that maybe elements like carbon or hydrogen would be next on the list ... but they'd be wrong. The element that ends up at #5 on the list is sulfur. Now, this exercise of thinking of a "bulk Earth" shows how bi ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
