AncientPages.com – Depending upon how you do the counting, there are around 9 million species on Earth, from the simplest single-celled organisms to humans. It’s reassuring to imagine that complex bodies and brains like ours are the inevitable consequence of evolution, as if evolution
Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – Birds descended from theropod dinosaurs by the Late Jurassic, but our understanding of the earliest evolution of the Avialae, the clade comprising all modern birds but not Deinonychus or Troodon, has been hampered by a
Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – Scientists have re-described a unique fossil animal from rocks nearly 520 million years old that fills in a gap in our understanding of the evolution of animals known as arthropods. The animal, which has
Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Natural selection is usually understood in the context of change. When organisms deviate from the norm, they may gain advantages that let their lineages outlast those of their less-adaptable relatives. But new research from Michigan
Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – A new fossil ape from an 8.7-million-year-old site in Türkiye is challenging long-accepted ideas of human origins and adding weight to the theory that the ancestors of African apes and humans evolved in Europe before
Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – A research team used advanced sequencing technology to analyze Ötzi’s genome to obtain a more accurate picture of the Iceman’s appearance and genetic origin. Since 2012, which is when Ötzi’s genome was sequenced for the
Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – Ammonoids are a group of extinct marine mollusk animals that are now an iconic fossil group often collected by amateurs. Over 350 million years of evolution, ammonoids developed increasingly elaborate shells with fractal-like geometry.
Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Genetic kinship analyses of human bones reach their limits if the DNA is poorly preserved or if destructive sampling is not possible. New research shows that in such cases, comparisons of the structure and shape
Conny Waters – AncientPages.com -Excavations in Hualongdong (HLD), East China, have revealed abundant hominin fossils dating back 300,000 years. The fossils from a late Middle Pleistocene were excavated by an international team of researchers in Hualongdong (HLD), East China. Anterior
AncientPages.com – Geneticists have now firmly established that roughly two percent of the DNA of all living non-African people comes from our Neanderthal cousins. It’s difficult to imagine why our early ancestors would have mated with them. Neanderthals were a
Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – The origin of bees is tens of millions of years older than most previous estimates, a new study shows. A team led by Washington State University researchers traced the bee genealogy back more than
Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Of the six or more different species of early humans, all belonging to the genus Homo, only we Homo sapiens have managed to survive. A study combining climate modeling and the fossil record in search
Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – A team of scientists led by researchers from the University of Leicester have discovered that the genes required for learning, memory, aggression and other complex behaviors originated around 650 million years ago. The findings led
Jan Bartek – AncientPages.com – Butterflies and moths share “blocks” of DNA dating back more than 200 million years, new research shows. Scientists from the Universities of Exeter (UK), Lübeck (Germany) and Iwate (Japan) devised a tool to compare the
Eddie Gonzales Jr. – AncientPages.com – Fossils reveal how ancient birds molted their feathers. Every bird you’ve ever seen— every robin, every pigeon, every penguin at the zoo— is a living dinosaur. Birds are the only group of dinosaurs that survived
Conny Waters – AncientPages.com – A new study has brought us one step closer to solving a mystery that has puzzled naturalists since Charles Darwin: when did animals first appear in the history of Earth? Reconstruction of the Ediacaran seafloor
