Researchers are considering the recently discovered Iani smithi (Iani), a mid-Cretaceous plant-eating dinosaur, a “last gasp” of a species as the planet’s climate warmed and altered life for its prehistoric inhabitants. According to a recent study from North Carolina State University, I. smithi was an early ornithopod — a species that would eventually lead to duckbill dinosaurs like Parasaurolophus and Edmontosaurus — that lived 99 million years ago. Researchers found the near ...read more
A new study estimates the weight of New York City’s buildings at 1.68 trillion pounds and says that, little by little, they’re sinking into the ground. The Big Apple could ultimately share the same fate as Venice, which is slipping into the Mediterranean Sea at a similar rate. Or it could see a reprise of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, during which ocean water flooded the city.Compounding the problem for both Venice and New York City is that the two cities will sink into rising waters – scienti ...read more
A new paper claims to have discovered a “lost world” of microscopic organisms that lived at least 1.6 billion years ago at a time when the planet’s waterways were full of bacteria. What these organisms looked like, scientists can only speculate, but they have proposed that the lost creatures were tiny predators that hunted said bacteria. The discovery fills in a large gap in the history of complex, eukaryotic life on Earth.Finding ProtosteroidsResearchers from the Australian National Unive ...read more
Humans began burying objects with their deceased loved ones long before anybody started recording history.Archaeological excavations of the Qafzeh and Skhul Caves in Israel have discovered graves dating back as far as 100,000 years that contain grave goods such as flint artifacts, animal bones, seashells and lumps of red ochre. Fast forward 75,000 thousand years and burials included decorative clothing, jewelry, weapons, animal carvings and other ornamental objects.Although there are a number of ...read more
Of all the weird, tiny organisms out there, tardigrades might just be the cutest.“Under a microscope, what you would see is this little critter that kind of looks like either an eight-legged Gummi bear, or an eight-legged manatee,” says Thomas Boothby, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming.To top it off, these lovable micro-animals are known colloquially as water bears or moss piglets.What Is a Tardigrade?(Credit: Shutterstock/Oleh Liubimtsev)Biologically speaking, tardigrades a ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
