The human age we live in has impacted nearly all life on our planet. Some of the worst of these effects are the extinctions and extirpations of an untold number of species over the past few thousand years at an accelerating rate. The most recent wave of extinction has led some scientists to call our period the Anthropocene Extinction, along with the Sixth Mass Extinction. In the past, the giant Chicxulub impactor caused the end of the non-avian dinosaurs and many other lifeforms 66 million years ...read more
As cute as they are, baby otters are also highly demanding, and moms carry the load. Mother otters teach pups how to groom themselves, to forage for tasty morsels like shellfish, to crack them open with a rock, to dive and even to swim. Baby otters hang around their moms for as long as eight to 11 months, compared to the mere four to six weeks that sea lions spend in their mothers’ care.But what happens when juvenile white sharks attack female otters, mistaking them for blubbery pinnipeds? Or ...read more
The most disturbing thing about exploding head syndrome is when it hits you. Just in the process of drifting off to sleep, people suddenly think they hear a piercing, crashing noise.“It’s usually very short, very loud — like a gunshot or explosion,” says Dan Denis, a psychologist with the University of York in the U.K. “It can be pretty scary.”Many people have experienced this once in their life, and a smaller subset reported recurrent episodes, sometimes as much as once per month. E ...read more
On November 24, 1974, Donald Johanson and Tom Gray were riding in a Land Rover on the hunt for bones. It was hot and dry, and the two were tired from a long day of excavating fossils. As they coasted through a dusty gully, having taken a different route than normal, Johanson spotted the forearm bone of a hominid poking out from beneath the dirt.Uncovering the ulna would lead to 47 other bones, including a skull bone, femur, ribs, pelvis, and the lower jaw, all of them belonging to a young adult ...read more
New fossils provide the missing links between smaller, earlier flying reptiles and the later massive pterosaurs. Initial pterosaurs had wingspans of about 6 feet, while later species measured as much as 32 feet across. Paleontologists describe the fossil of the new species, Skiphosoura bavarica, in a Current Biology report.Splitting Flying ReptilesAlthough Skiphosoura appears to be about the same size as early pterosaurs, it holds some important anatomical differences. Paleontologists had long s ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine