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Categories: Engineering: Biometric, Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds

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A team of engineers has demonstrated for the first time that the Bluetooth signals emitted constantly by our mobile phones have a unique fingerprint that can be used to track individuals' movements.

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Using radio transmitters, scientists have gained new insights into the behavior of medium ground finches in the Galapagos Islands. A study reveals daily movement patterns covering an area equivalent to the size of 30 soccer fields.

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New research suggests that determining evolutionary trees of organisms by comparing anatomy rather than gene sequences is misleading. The study shows that we often need to overturn centuries of scholarly work that classified living things according to how they look.

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Paleontologists have debated whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. In a new paper, scientists are unveiling a new method for studying dinosaurs' metabolic rates, using clues in their bones.

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Scientists settle debate surrounding species that laid eggs exploited by early Australian people around 50,000 years ago. Shell proteins point to Genyornis, which was among the 'mega-fauna' to go extinct a few thousand years after humans arrived on the continent.

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Researchers shed light on the way Quetzalcoatlus would have flown, finding that the dinosaur's flying dynamics were actually very different to how it has been depicted in popular culture.

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Jars of tiny platypus and echidna specimens, collected in the late 1800s by the scientist William Caldwell, have been discovered in the stores of Cambridge's University Museum of Zoology.

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Researchers have examined the mass extinction of large animals over the past tens of thousands of years and found that extinct species had, on average, much smaller brains than species that survived.

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Human-related extinctions of the largest herbivores and carnivores are disrupting what appears to be a fundamental feature of past and present ecosystems, says a new study.

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Crows and ravens have great flying ability, which allows them to gain access to new places more easily. While these skills were key to their success, new research also shows that big bodies and big brains played an important role in helping crows and ravens survive in the new climates they occupied.

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Palaeontologists have discovered remarkable new evidence that pterosaurs, the flying relatives of dinosaurs, were able to control the color of their feathers using melanin pigments.

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The first large-scale study of its kind has uncovered more than 4,000 years' worth of distinctive foraging behavior in a species once driven to the brink of extinction.

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A new study combining records of climate change during the last 3.5 million years with fossil evidence of mammals in Africa reveals that times of erratic climate change are not followed by major upheavals in evolution.

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One of the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology is, how did the Amazon become so rich in species? A new study focused on birds examines how the movements of rivers in the Amazon have contributed to that area's exceptional biological diversity. The researchers found that as small river systems change over time, they spur the evolution of new species. The findings also reveal previously unknown bird species in the Amazon that are only found in small areas next to these dynamic river systems, putting them at high risk.

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Prehistoric mammals bulked up, rather than develop bigger brains, to boost their survival chances once dinosaurs had become extinct, research suggests.

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Skin cells and their DNA varies between individuals, but new data shows that some groups of people have higher variability in their cell deposits. The South Australian forensic science researchers are building a suite of new insights into crime scene investigation -- including the difference between high, intermediate and low skin 'shedders' that will help understanding of trace or 'touch DNA'.

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Researchers have developed a metasurface attachment that can turn just about any camera or imaging system, even off-the-shelf systems, into polarization cameras. The attachment uses a metasurface of subwavelength nanopillars to direct light based on its polarization and compiles an image that captures polarization at every pixel.

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Much of a centuries-old debate over where and how new bird species form has now been resolved. Researchers have provided evidence that birds in mountainous areas -- where the vast majority of the planet's species live -- have left lowland habitats for higher and higher mountain elevations throughout their evolution. Millions of years of climatic fluctuations have contributed to pushing bird species upslope -- as is probably happening now.

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Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammoths 4,000 years ago, and the Christmas Island Rat 119 years ago. Since becoming a popular concept in the 1990s, de-extinction efforts have focused on grand animals with mythical stature, but now a team of paleogeneticists has turned their attention to Rattus macleari, and their findings provide insights into the limitations of de-extinction across all species.

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A new study provides vital clues on when killer whales began feeding on other marine mammals.