NEWSWORTHY
Have you ever heard of macaws that blush? Researchers still don't quite understand how it works, but a French team has observed the phenomenon multiple times in a group of five captive blue-and-yellow macaws (Ara ararauna). They published their findings Wednesday in the journal PLOS One. Blue-and-yellow ...
How did the turtle get its shell? It sounds like the start of a fable, but it is something scientists have wondered for years, and new fossil research is providing some clues. The way that turtles evolved into their modern form, with a shell fused ...
Set of teeth from ancient mega-shark found in rock on Australian beach
A rare set of teeth from a giant prehistoric mega-shark twice the size of the great white have been found on an Australian beach by a keen-eyed amateur enthusiast, scientists said Thursday. Philip Mullaly was strolling along an area known as a fossil hot spot ...
Stone tools recovered from an excavation in China suggest that our evolutionary forerunners trekked out of Africa earlier than we had thought. Until now, the oldest evidence of human-like creatures outside Africa came from 1.8-million-year-old artifacts and skulls found in the Georgian town of Dmanisi. ...
The nipples of women are far more varied than those of men, according to a study that challenges conventional theory. An axiom in evolutionary biology says the more important a body part, the less it will differ from person to person. We can't live without a ...
New Caledonian crows use mental pictures to twist twigs into hooks and make other tools, according to a provocative study that suggests the notoriously clever birds pass on successful designs to future generations, a hallmark of culture. "We find evidence for a specific type of ...
Mars' surface hardened quickly, boosting odds of life: study
The crust that encases rocky planets and makes possible the emergence of life took shape on Mars earlier than thought and at least 100 million years sooner than on Earth, researchers said Wednesday. Analyzing grains of the mineral zircon extracted from a Martian meteorite known ...
Complex organic molecules have been discovered originating from one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, adding to its potential to support life, researchers said on Wednesday. The Cassini spacecraft first flew close to the ice-covered moon in 2005 as part of a mission to gather data on ...
T. rex could not stick out its tongue, contrary to usual depictions: study
The Tyrannosaurus rex is crowned the "lizard king" of the dinosaurs, a historically fierce meat eater often depicted lashing out its tongue. But researchers said Wednesday this would have been anatomically impossible. That is because the long-extinct T. rex likely had a tongue that was ...
South Africa tetrapod fossil find blows myth that fish ancestors walked ashore in tropics only
The discovery of two Devonian tetrapods in South Africa suggests that the evolution of these creatures from water to land could have occurred anywhere else, and not only in the tropics as was previously thought, a study has established. The evolution of tetrapods — four ...
Scientists have pinpointed three genes that may have played a pivotal role in the evolution of the striking increase in brain size that helped define what it means to be human. These genes, found only in people, appeared between 3 and 4 million years ago, ...
Who would have suspected that a handheld genetic test used to unmask sushi bars pawning off tilapia for tuna could deliver deep insights into evolution, including how new species emerge? And who would have thought to trawl through 5 million of these gene snapshots — ...
