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Magazine
In the Feb. 16 SN: Robots roll into the classroom, brain zaps for severe depression, particle colliders of the future, how to walk like a tetrapod, sleepless nights boost Alzheimer's proteins and more.
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Year in Review
Greenland crater renewed the debate over an ancient climate mystery
12/17/2018 - 08:27 Earth, Climate, PaleontologyFor three years, a team of scientists kept a big secret: They had discovered a giant crater-shaped depression buried beneath about a kilometer of ice in northwestern Greenland. In November, the researchers revealed their find to the world.
They hadn’t set out to find a crater. But in 2015, glaciologists studying ice-penetrating radar images of Greenland’s ice sheet, part of an...
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News
Volcanic eruptions that depleted ocean oxygen may have set off the Great Dying
12/06/2018 - 14:00 Oceans, Climate, Earth, PaleontologyA massive series of volcanic eruptions in Earth’s distant past left ocean creatures gasping for breath. Greenhouse gases emitted by the volcanoes dramatically lowered oxygen levels in the oceans, a deadly scenario that may have been the main culprit in the Great Dying, researchers report.
Earth scientist Justin Penn of the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues mapped out...
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Introducing
This huge plant eater thrived in the age of dinosaurs — but wasn’t one of them
11/22/2018 - 14:00 Paleontology, AnimalsA new species of hulking ancient herbivore would have overshadowed its relatives.
Fossils found in Poland belong to a new species that roamed during the Late Triassic, a period some 237 million to 201 million years ago, researchers report November 22 in Science. But unlike most of the enormous animals who lived during that time period, this new creature isn’t a dinosaur — it’s a...
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Feature
How mammoths competed with other animals and lost
11/13/2018 - 12:30 Ecosystems, Archaeology, PaleontologyThe Gray Fossil Site, a sinkhole in northeastern Tennessee, is full of prehistoric treasures. Between 7 million and 4.5 million years ago, rhinoceroses, saber-toothed cats and other creatures, even red pandas, perished here by the edge of a pond. But that bounty of fossils pales next to the site’s biggest find: a mastodon’s skeleton, nearly 5 million years old, preserved in exquisite detail...
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Reviews & Previews
‘End of the Megafauna’ examines why so many giant Ice Age animals went extinct
11/06/2018 - 09:00 Paleontology, Animals, ClimateEnd of the MegafaunaRoss D.E. MacPhee and Peter Schouten (illustrator)W.W. Norton & Co., $35
Today’s land animals are a bunch of runts compared with creatures from the not-too-distant past. Beasts as big as elephants, gorillas and bears were once much more common around the world. Then, seemingly suddenly, hundreds of big species, including the woolly mammoth, the giant ground...
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News
Eggs evolved color and speckles only once — during the age of dinosaurs
10/31/2018 - 16:05 PaleontologyThe colorful, speckled eggs of modern birds are an innovation inherited from their nonavian dinosaur ancestors.
A new analysis of the pigmentation in modern and fossilized eggshells suggests that eggs evolved to be colorful only once — in modern birds’ dinosaur ancestors, a team of vertebrate paleontologists report online October 31 in Nature. Color patterns found in the eggshells of...
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News
The first vertebrates on Earth arose in shallow coastal waters
10/25/2018 - 14:08 Paleontology, Animals, EcologyThe cradle of vertebrate evolution was limited to a zone of shallow coastal waters, no more than 60 meters deep.
In those waters, fish — the first vertebrates — appeared roughly 480 million years ago, a study finds. For nearly 100 million years, those creatures rarely strayed from that habitat, where they diversified into a dizzying array of new forms, scientists report in the Oct. 26...
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News in Brief
T. rex pulverized bones with an incredible amount of force
10/22/2018 - 08:00 Paleontology, Animals, BiophysicsALBUQUERQUE — Tyrannosaurus rex had a special way of crunching bones.
A lethal combination of a powerful bite, strong teeth and repeated crunching allowed these giant predators to pulverize the bones of their prey, researchers reported October 20 at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology’s annual meeting.
Bones have a nutritious inner cavity containing marrow and phosphate salts....
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News
In a first, scientists spot what may be lungs in an ancient bird fossil
10/19/2018 - 12:13 PaleontologyALBUQUERQUE — Fossilized lungs found preserved along with an ancient bird may breathe new life into studies of early avian respiration. If confirmed as lungs, the find marks the first time that researchers have spotted the respiratory organs in a bird fossil.
Scientists have previously described four fossils of Archaeorhynchus spathula, an early beaked and feathered bird that lived about...
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News
These ancient mounds may not be the earliest fossils on Earth after all
10/17/2018 - 13:00 Earth, Paleontology, MicrobesTiny mounds touted as the earliest fossilized evidence of life on Earth may just be twisted rock.
Found in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks in Greenland, the mounds strongly resemble cone-shaped microbial mats called stromatolites, researchers reported in 2016. But a new analysis of the shape, internal layers and chemistry of the structures suggests that the mounds weren’t shaped by microbes...