Popular Science articles about Paleontology & Archaeology

Has the mystery of the Portrait of Maud Abrantes been solved?

<i>The Portrait of Maud Abrantes</i>, by Amedeo Modigliani.<br /><br />
A century after Modigliani painted the Portrait of Maud Abrantes, the mystery behind the painting might be solved. Ofra Rimon, Director and Curator of the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa, discovered that hidden in the painting is the portrait of another woman. "Modigliani was probably not happy with that painting and decided to paint over it in favor of a portrait of Maud," she claims.

Ancient remains put teeth into Barker hypothesis

Ancient human teeth are telling secrets that may relate to modern-day health: Some stressful events that occurred early in development are linked to shorter life spans.

UF researchers: Ancient crocodile relative likely food source for Titanoboa

A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described this week by University of Florida researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the...

Novel studies of decomposition shed new light on our earliest fossil ancestry

Decaying corpses are usually the domain of forensic scientists, but palaeontologists have discovered that studying rotting fish sheds new light on our earliest ancestry.

GW research team's dinosaur discovery helps solve piece of evolutionary puzzle

A George Washington University expedition to the Gobi Desert of China has enabled researchers to solve the puzzle of how one group of dinosaurs came to look like birds independent...

The color of dinosaur feathers identified

The colour of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time, reports a paper published in Nature this week.

Last Neanderthals died out 37,000 years ago

The paper, by Professor João Zilhão and colleagues, builds on his earlier research which proposed that, south of the Cantabro-Pyrenean mountain chain, Neanderthals survived for several millennia after being replaced...

World's least known bird rediscovered

A species of bird, which has only been observed alive on three previous occasions since it was first discovered in 1867, has been rediscovered in a remote land corridor in...

Can modern-day plants trace their New Zealand ancestry?

One hundred million years ago the earth looked very different from how it does today. Continents were joining and breaking apart, dinosaurs were roaming the earth, and flowering plants...

Study: Animals populated Madagascar by rafting there

How did the lemurs, flying foxes and narrow-striped mongooses get to the large, isolated island of Madagascar sometime after 65 million years ago?

Most modern European males descend from farmers who migrated from the Near East

A new study from the University of Leicester has found that most men in Europe descend from the first farmers who migrated from the Near East 10,000 years ago. The...

Yale scientists complete color palette of a dinosaur for the first time

Deciphering microscopic clues hidden within fossils, scientists have uncovered the vibrant colors that adorned a feathered dinosaur extinct for 150 million years, a Yale University-led research team reports online Feb. 4 in the journal Science.

Imaging method for eye disease used to eye art forgeries

Scientists in Poland are describing how a medical imaging technique has taken on a second life in revealing forgery of an artist's signature and changes in inscriptions on paintings that...

DNA testing on 2,000-year-old bones in Italy reveal East Asian ancestry

Researchers excavating an ancient Roman cemetery made a surprising discovery when they extracted ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from one of the skeletons buried at the site: the 2,000-year-old bones revealed...

Seabed biodiversity of the Straits of Magellan and Drake Passage

A study of animals visible to the naked eye and living in and on the seabed – the 'macrobenthos' – of the Straits of Magellan and Drake Passage will help...

With climate change, birds are taking off for migration sooner; not reaching destinations earlier

Migrating birds can and do keep their travel dates flexible, a new study published online on January 28th in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveals. But in the case...

Lost Roman law code discovered in London

Part of an ancient Roman law code previously thought to have been lost forever has been discovered by researchers at UCL's Department of History. Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway made...

Researchers of microraptor shed light on ancient origin of bird flight

A joint team from the University of Kansas and Northeastern University in China says that it has settled the long-standing question of how bird flight began.

New evidence links humans to megafauna demise

A new scientific paper co-authored by a University of Adelaide researcher reports strong evidence that humans, not climate change, caused the demise of Australia's megafauna -- giant marsupials, huge reptiles...

Chemical analyses uncover secrets of an ancient amphora

A team of chemists from the University of Valencia (UV) has confirmed that the substance used to hermetically seal an amphora found among remains at Lixus, in Morocco, was pine...

The science behind the perfectly delivered curling rock

The centuries old game of curling is being put under the scrutiny of 21st century technology in a bid to help Canada's best curlers throw their way to gold at...

New theory on the origin of primates

A new model for primate origins is presented in Zoologica Scripta, published by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The paper argues...