Popular Science articles about Paleontology & Archaeology

After mastodons and mammoths, a transformed landscape

Roughly 15,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, North America's vast assemblage of large animals — including such iconic creatures as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, ground sloths and giant beavers — began their precipitous slide to...

Paleontologists find extinction rates higher in open-ocean settings during mass extinctions

Arnie Miller, University of Cincinnati professor of paleontology in the McMicken College of Arts & Sciences, and co-author Michael Foote of the University of Chicago publish their research in the...

'Hobbits' are a new human species -- according to the statistical analysis of fossils

Researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York have confirmed that Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by...

Study pits man v. machine in piecing together 425-million-year-old jigsaw

A new study pitting academic expertise against a computer in recreating a 425 million-year old jigsaw puzzle has discovered that there is no substitute for wisdom born out of experience.

California's ancient kelp forest

The kelp forests off southern California are considered to be some of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on the planet, yet a new study indicates that today's kelp beds...

Warm-blooded dinosaurs worked up a sweat

Were dinosaurs endothermic (warm-blooded) like present-day mammals and birds or ectothermic (cold-blooded) like present-day lizards? Reporting in PLoS ONE, Herman Pontzer at Washington University in St Louis and colleagues sought...

Ancient penguin DNA raises doubts about accuracy of genetic dating techniques

Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely...

Remains of Minoan-style painting discovered during excavations of Canaanite palace

The remains of a Minoan-style wall painting, recognizable by a blue background, the first of its kind to be found in Israel, was discovered in the course of the recent...

The last European hadrosaurs lived in the Iberian Peninsula

Spanish researchers have studied the fossil record of hadrosaurs, the so-called 'duck-billed' dinosaurs, in the Iberian Peninsula for the purpose of determining that they were the last of their kind...

Atlanta's Fernbank Museum tracks infamous conquistador through southeast

Archaeologists at Atlanta's Fernbank Museum of Natural History have discovered unprecedented evidence that helps map Hernando de Soto's journey through the Southeast in 1540. No evidence of De Soto's path...

The humble beginnings of a king

Tyrannosaurus rex and related large carnivorous dinosaurs together form the family Tyrannosauridae. A long forgotten fossil skull in the collections of the Natural History Museum in London has now provided...

BoarCroc, RatCroc, DogCroc, DuckCroc and PancakeCroc

On the cusp of discovery, Paul Sereno, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, closes in on the remains of "BoarCroc," a 20-foot-long meat eater with an armored snout for ramming and three sets of dagger-shaped fangs used for slicing.

Heart disease found in Egyptian mummies

Hardening of the arteries has been detected in Egyptian mummies, some as old as 3,500 years, suggesting that the factors causing heart attack and stroke are not only modern ones;...

Extinct moa rewrites New Zealand's history

DNA recovered from fossilised bones of the moa, a giant extinct bird, has revealed a new geological history of New Zealand, reports a study published this week in the Proceedings...

Funny, you don't look related

When Charles Darwin visited the Falkland Islands during the voyage of the Beagle in 1835, he saw a wolf-like species, wrote about it in his diaries and correctly commented that...

Telling an old book by its smell: Aroma hints at ways of preserving treasured documents

Scientists may not be able to tell a good book by its cover, but they now can tell the condition of an old book by its odor. In a report...

New fossil plant discovery links Patagonia to New Guinea in a warmer past

Fossil plants are windows to the past, providing us with clues as to what our planet looked like millions of years ago. Not only do fossils tell us which...

The bizarre lives of bone-eating worms

The females of the recently discovered Osedax marine worms feast on submerged bones via a complex relationship with symbiotic bacteria, and they are turning out to be far more diverse...

AIBS publishes Darwin articles open access

To celebrate the 150th anniversary this month of the publication of On the Origin of Species, the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS) is publishing open access two peer-reviewed articles...

Male sabertoothed cats were pussycats compared to macho lions

Despite their fearsome fangs, male sabertoothed cats may have been less aggressive than many of their feline cousins, says a new study of male-female size differences in extinct big cats.

Portable 3-D laser technology preserves Texas dinosaur's rare footprint

Using portable 3D laser technology, scientists have electronically preserved a rare 110 million-year-old fossilized dinosaur footprint that was previously excavated and built into the wall of a bandstand at a...

New clues to the Falklands wolf mystery

Ever since the Falklands wolf was described by Darwin himself, the origin of this now-extinct canid found only on the Falkland Islands far off the east coast of Argentina has...