The first primates arrived in the Americas about 56 million years ago and prospered for a time, but it wasn’t to be.They died out some 34 million years ago, after the Eocene-Oligocene extinction event, during which the planet became cooler and drier. Half of all mammal genera died around the globe.But somehow, this set the stage for a lemur-like animal known as Ekgmowechashala to establish itself in the Great Plains of the present-day U.S.Scientists have disputed how to classify the odd-looki ...read more
Colorful bodies painted in vibrant reds or blacks, heads dressed in wigs of human hair, and masks with eyes and mouths wide open, as if still breathing – these were the mummies made by the Chinchorro people.They were among the earliest ancient humans to settle on what’s now the coast of northern Chile and southern Peru. And the mummies are the oldest in the world, predating even the first mummified pharaohs of Ancient Egypt by a couple millennia. But after thousands of years, Chinchorro mumm ...read more
This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Answers in the Ashes" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Tom Kluge was at home getting ready for work when he got the call from an emergency command center dispatch. It was Nov. 8, 2018, and a wildland fire had been spotted northeast of Pulga, a remote community tucked away in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains about 35 miles from where Kluge was stationed.At the time a fire captain specialist and 16-y ...read more
This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Floating in the Clouds" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Stepping onto one of the Uros islands in southern Peru can feel like walking on a bouncy castle. Your feet sink a bit into the mushy floor, which trembles slightly when a motorboat speeds past. That’s because this land is actually floating — on the largest lake in South America, located 12,500 feet above sea level in the Andes Mountains.Hundr ...read more
This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Moth to a Flame." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Robert Hoare first spotted the elusive Izatha psychra, an endangered moth in New Zealand, on a warm night in 2005. At the center of the country’s South Island, amid the fenced flats and sloping hills of the Pukaki Scientific Reserve, the entomologist erected a generator-powered light trap. Then, an hour before midnight — just as the generator’s f ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine