Female killer whales can live up to 90 years in the wild, including 22 years after they go through menopause. That’s almost as many years as human hunter-gatherers, who lived for an average of 26 years post-menopause.Aging female orcas remain an important part of their pods, but why not make them more important? Why would evolution select for such a long period in which the animals cannot pass on their genetic material? That’s the question a new study some 50 years in the making attempts to ...read more
As long as there has been life on Earth, there has been extinction. In fact, nearly every life form that has called Earth home has gone extinct.“Of the 50 billion or so species that have [lived] during our planet’s 4.5 billion year history, more than 99 percent have disappeared,” says Jessica Whiteside, a planetary paleontologist at University of Southampton.In particular, mass extinction events have shaped the course of evolution and Earth itself. This refers to relatively short spans of ...read more
Museums house thousands of animal specimens that are ancient, extinct, newly discovered and have yet to be studied. New York's American Museum of Natural History has 33 million specimens inside, while the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. has a whopping 145 million holdings.While most animals collected by these institutions have been obtained legally, euthanized painlessly and researched with respect, some researchers often wonder whether there could be a better ...read more
We like to think of ourselves as special. We’re Homo sapiens, after all. But a new study of Ice Age Europe has found that our supposedly unique bone tools, a sign of higher intelligence, weren’t so unique after all. Neanderthals fashioned and used hundreds of the same tools while butchering animals and preparing hides, according to a new paper.Evidence for this has arisen, in recent years, from two Neanderthal sites of some note – starting with the Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai Mountains i ...read more
Although dirt doesn’t seem to be particularly interesting on the surface — we often picture a lifeless, unremarkable substance beneath our feet — it’s actually a dynamic ecosystem teeming with organisms. And these organisms hold the power to make or break all of life on Earth.One such unsung hero is the humble earthworm and, most importantly, its toilet habits. If you plop your spade into a patch of healthy soil, chances are that most of this is stuff that's come out the back end of an e ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
