Latest science news in Paleontology & Archaeology
Court Weighs Concerns on Whales and Military
The Supreme Court heard arguments over the Navy’s use of sonar in its training exercises off Southern California.
DNA could reveal your surname
Scientists at the world-leading Department of Genetics at the University of Leicester ??? where the revolutionary technique of genetic fingerprinting was invented by Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys- are developing techniques...
Opening a can of worms: Serendipitous discovery reveals earthworms more diverse than first thought
Scientists have found that the UK's common or garden earthworms are far more diverse than previously thought, a discovery with important consequences for agriculture.
Egypt to host first Northern African nanotech centre
A partnership between Egypt and IBM will establish the first regional nanotechnology research centre in Cairo.
Species Extinction By Asteroid A Rarity
New research argues in favor of a "sick earth" mechanism for most extinctions, rather than external event like an asteroid strike.
Super-sized dinos had super-sized stomachs
Brachiosaurs and other long-necked giants of the dinosaur world weighed as much as 10 African elephants. Researchers now think they know why the tubby vegetarian beasts got so big: They...
"Daisy Chains" of Fossil Creatures Found in China
Shrimplike organisms that linked together in single-file rows 525 million years ago represent a bizarre and previously unknown type of animal grouping, scientists say.
Biggest Dinosaurs Grew Huge by Not Chewing Their Food
The biggest land animals that ever lived grew huge and were an evolutionary success in part because they swallowed large quantities of food whole, new research suggests.
Death Rituals Reveal Much About Ancient Life
Cultures around the world and through time have had wildly varying ways of dealing with the dead.
Video - Fish Thrive in Ocean Trenches
Groups of snailfish swarm bait in one of the world's deepest ocean trenches in the Pacific, where the fish contend with total darkness, near freezing temperatures and immense water pressure....
How the turtle got its shell
Famous for carrying its shelled "home" on its back, the humble, plodding turtle has also been toting around one of the biggest mysteries of the animal kingdom. Paleontologists have now...
Deep Biosphere Research Points To New Methods For Recovering Petroleum
Miles below us, deep within Earth's crust, life is astir. Organisms there are not the large creatures typically envisioned when thinking of life. Instead, thriving there are microbes, the smallest...
Meet George Washington’s closest kin
A genealogy Web site says it has found the king of America — or rather, the descendant of George Washington's family who would have most likely held the title had...
Origins of Maya pottery material remain mysterious
Analyses give clues to composition of ash, seek to identify its source
Divers reach ship that sank off Mass. in 1898
Five Massachusetts men became the first divers to reach the wreck of a 19th-century steamship that sank in one of the most destructive storms in New England history, and say...
Speaking up - women's voices rise in tune with fertility
Pitch of female voices found to be roughly a semitone higher at most fertile time in cycle
Tim Dowling: Why the halt of evolution is a good thing
Tim Dowling: Now we know we'll get to stay just exactly as we are until we've finished reducing this planet to a smouldering cinder
Chocolate lovers: more kinds of cacao
Scientists have discovered that there are actually 10 genetic types of cacao, the plant from which chocolate is made, rather than the mere three that were thought to exist.
Dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions
BRISTOL, England, Oct. 7 (UPI) -- British scientists say they've determined dinosaurs survived two mass extinctions and 50 million years before taking over the world's ecosystems.
Ads to the rescue as distraction from root canals
(AP) -- Talk about your captive audience. Advertising is coming to the dentist's chair in the form of personal video goggles that patients wear while getting their cleaning or...
Johnjoe McFadden: Dipping into our gene pool
Johnjoe McFadden: Steve Jones paints a gloomy picture of human evolution at the end of the line – but you could argue that it's only at the beginning
Audubon’s Species: Bird Art, in All Its Glory
Four new books illuminate the confluence of science, art and ornithology.
Small asteroid headed for light show over Africa
(AP) -- A small asteroid was headed for a fiery but harmless dive into Earth's atmosphere early Tuesday morning over Africa, astronomers said in a first of its kind...
"Uncontacted" Tribes Fled Peru Logging, Arrows Suggest
Arrows and abandoned huts are fresh evidence that isolated indigenous tribes are being displaced by illegal logging, conservation groups say.
Egalitarian Revolution In The Pleistocene?
Although anthropologists and evolutionary biologists are still debating this question, a new study supports the view that the first egalitarian societies may have appeared tens of thousands of years before...
Researchers Use Chemometric Method to Determine Age of Skeletal Remains
Baylor University researchers have found a promising new method to determine the date of skeletal remains. The relatively simple technique of applying statistics to chemical measurements could provide a...
VIDEO: Ice Age People in Florida?
People may have lived in Florida over 10,000 years ago—earlier than previously thought—according to evidence uncovered by National Geographic researchers.
Puzzling over pre-humans
Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: Decades after a 3.2-million-year-old "almost human" named Lucy became a star, the origin of our species still poses mysteries worthy of a crime show.