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
Pterosaurs, which means winged lizard in Greek, are often referred to as flying dinosaurs, but they aren't actually dinosaurs. They're an extinct group of flying reptiles that ruled the skies starting 225 million years ago. Still, they're more closely related to birds and dinosaurs than they are modern reptiles. And they were also the first vertebrae to leave land and take to the skies.The Evolution of Pterosaurs(Credit: Akkharat Jarusilawong/Shutterstock)The earliest pterosaurs were smaller ...read more
The ocean is unfathomably deep.To try to fathom it, picture trekking from sea level to the top of the world’s tallest peak, Mount Everest. If it was inverted above the Mariana Trench, the submerged tip would come more than a mile short of the seafloor. This deepest region known in our seas — a crescent-shaped canyon near Guam and the Mariana Islands — is located in the western Pacific Ocean. How Deep Is the Mariana Trench?Some measurements in the Mariana Trench have charted depths exceedi ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
