When Charles Darwin proposed the idea of evolution in On the Origin of Species, he wrote “if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed.” At the same time, he bemoaned the dearth of such transitional fossils as perhaps “the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory.”  Surely it was serendipity when, just two years later, quarriers unearthed fossils of Archaeopteryx. This creature, now recognized by many scientists as the first known bird, ... (p. 30)

News briefs from the American Meteorological Society annual meeting being held January 11–15 in Phoenix.

Paleontologists have discovered a fossil partially covered with broad, unbranched filaments — a type of structure previously theorized to exist on primitive feathered dinosaurs but not found until now.

Two meteorites retrieved from West Antarctica, fragments of an ancient asteroid, contain a type of rock commonly found in Earth’s crust but previously unseen in meteorites. (p. 15)

Science News reports from San Francisco at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (p. 13)

Evidence of seafloor rise and fall shows southern Sumatra is at start of new earthquake cycle.

Earth is regularly bombarded by small meteorites, but most of the resulting craters are hard to find. A team reports finding one such crater in the forests of west-central Alberta.

The chemistry of minerals preserved in Australian rocks suggests tectonic activity for Earth’s earliest eon. (p. 10)

Bacteria can build a biofilm that preserves a tissue's structure.

About 70 percent of Earth's surface is covered with water, some 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of it. Too bad almost 96.5 percent of it's salty, and another 2 percent is locked away as ice in remote places such as Greenland and Antarctica. All told, just a little more than 1 percent of our planet's water is fresh and readily available for human uses such as drinking and irrigating crops. Even that small fraction, however, isn't evenly distributed. Some regions are haves�think tropical rain forests�and others are Saharan have-nots.New computer studies suggest that a number of nations will join th...