1+ day, 6+ hour ago   (243+ words) Paleontologists at the University of New South Wales have described a new genus and species of dasyurid marsupial from the Early Miocene of Australia, offering the first solid evidence that the family Dasyuridae -- which today includes quolls, Tasmanian devils and…...

1+ day, 9+ hour ago   (362+ words) New 3D computer simulations from ETH Zurich show that young rift flanks on Venus stay tall and steep, while older ones flatten out over time. “Rift valleys, which indicate tectonic activity, can be vast and resemble those on Earth, such as…...

2+ day, 2+ hour ago   (909+ words) Paleontologists have unearthed a remarkably preserved fossil snake in Brazil that is reshaping ideas about how the earliest snakes lived and complicating the long-running debate over whether their ancestors burrowed underground, swam in the sea or crawled the surface. Life…...

2+ day, 7+ hour ago   (155+ words) New data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft show temperatures spike more than 20 degrees Celsius just a few meters under Io’s surface, providing the first look at what’s happening below the crust of the Solar System’s most volcanic world....

2+ day, 10+ hour ago   (345+ words) A 201-million-year-old climate catastrophe turned Europe into a landscape of fern savannahs that repeatedly caught fire, according to new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience....

3+ day, 4+ hour ago   (500+ words) An artist’s impression of a pliosaur. Image credit: Megan Jacobs, University of Portsmouth. “Liopleurodon ferox is a well-known thalassophonean pliosaurid from the Middle Jurassic (Callovian) Oxford Clay Formation of England and equivalent strata in northwest France,” said University of Portsmouth…...

3+ day, 5+ hour ago   (351+ words) Ararat-1, a modest limestone cave that lies at an elevation of 1,034 m on the eastern flanks of the Ararat Depression in central Armenia, has yielded a striking puzzle about how Middle Paleolithic humans moved across their landscape....

3+ day, 8+ hour ago   (756+ words) In a new study of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), scientists found that embraces, touches and other reassuring gestures before competition for food were linked to more peaceful sharing, suggesting the roots of human social touch stretch back…...

3+ day, 11+ hour ago   (311+ words) A head-on collision with another galaxy billions of years ago may have dramatically reoriented the Milky Way’s disk, according to new supercomputer simulations that reveal how violent mergers can leave spiral galaxies looking surprisingly normal today....

4+ day, 5+ hour ago   (184+ words) Paleontologists in India have unearthed a partial skeleton of a diminutive, previously unknown neosauropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic rocks of Gujarat’s Kachchh Basin....