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Categories: Geoscience: Geomagnetic Storms, Paleontology: Fossils

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New fossils in amber have revealed that beetles fed on the feathers of dinosaurs about 105 million years ago, showing a symbiotic relationship of one-sided or mutual benefit.

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For more than half a century, the Tully monster (Tullimonstrum gregarium), an enigmatic animal that lived about 300 million years ago, has confounded paleontologists, with its strange anatomy making it difficult to classify. Recently, a group of researchers proposed a hypothesis that Tullimonstrum was a vertebrate similar to cyclostomes (jawless fish like lamprey and hagfish). If it was, then the Tully monster would potentially fill a gap in the evolutionary history of early vertebrates. Studies so far have both supported and rejected this hypothesis. Now, using 3D imaging technology, a team in Japan believes it has found the answer after uncovering detailed characteristics of the Tully monster which strongly suggest that it was not a vertebrate. However, its exact classification and what type of invertebrate it was is still to be decided.

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Insect pollination is a decisive process for the survival and evolution of angiosperm (flowering) plants and, to a lesser extent, gymnosperms (without visible flower or fruit). There is a growing interest in studies on the origins of the relationship between insects and plants, especially in the current context of the progressive decline of pollinating insects on a global scale and its impact on food production. Pollinating insects can be recognized in the fossil record, although to date, there has been no protocol for their differentiation. Fossil pollinators have been found in both rock and amber deposits, and it is in rock deposits that the first evidence of plant pollination by insects is being studied across the globe. But how can we determine which was a true insect pollinator in the past?

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Studying mass extinction events from the past can build our understanding of how ecosystems and the communities of organisms within them respond. Researchers are looking to the Late Devonian mass extinction which happened around 370 million years ago to better understand how communities of organisms respond in times of great upheaval.

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New research led by a paleobotanist provides clues about what plants existed in the Burnaby Mountain area (British Columbia, Canada) 40 million years ago during the late Eocene, when the climate was much warmer than it is today.

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Anthropologists have long thought that our ape ancestors evolved an upright torso in order to pick fruit in forests, but new research from the University of Michigan suggests a life in open woodlands and a diet that included leaves drove apes' upright stature.

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Scientists have described a new species of bat based on the oldest bat skeletons ever recovered. The study on the extinct bat, which lived in Wyoming about 52 million years ago, supports the idea that bats diversified rapidly on multiple continents during this time.

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The ancestors of modern mammals managed to evolve into one of the most successful animal lineages -- the key was to start out small and simple, a new study reveals.

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A team of researchers compared the genomes of woolly mammoths with modern day elephants to find out what made woolly mammoths unique, both as individuals and as a species. The investigators report that many of the woolly mammoth's trademark features -- including their woolly coats and large fat deposits -- were already genetically encoded in the earliest woolly mammoths, but these and other traits became more defined over the species' 700,000+ year existence. They also identified a gene with several mutations that may have been responsible for the woolly mammoth's miniscule ears.

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Today, ants are pretty much everywhere. To learn more about how these insects conquered the world, scientists used a combination of fossils, DNA, and data on the habitat preferences of modern species to piece together how ants and plants have been evolving together over the past 60 million years. They found that when flowering plants spread out from forests, the ants followed, kicking off the evolution of the thousands of ant species alive today.

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Ancient 2m-long amphibians swam like crocodiles long before true crocodiles existed, according to a new study.

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A new discovery changes ideas about the origin of branching in plants.

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Research has revealed that diversity in genes coding for immunity may have facilitated adaptation to farming lifestyles in prehistoric periods.

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Is nitrate responsible for algae, flowers, and even your neighbors? A team of geoscientists have unearthed evidence that may indicate yes.

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Leading edge technology has uncovered secrets about a world-renowned fossil hoard that could offer vital clues about early life on Earth. Researchers who analyzed the 400 million-year-old cache, found in rural north-east Scotland, say their findings reveal better preservation of the fossils at a molecular level than was previously anticipated.

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Geneticists have written new chapters in the reconstruction of pre-colonial Americas history after using DNA from the indigenous Ashaninka people from Amazonian Peru. They have discovered previously unexpected levels of genetic variation in this group and uncovered a strong hint that these people were involved in a South-to-North migration that led to the transition from an archaic to ceramic culture in the Caribbean islands.

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Billions of sea anemones adorn the bottom of the Earth's oceans -- yet they are among the rarest of fossils because their squishy bodies lack easily fossilized hard parts. Now a team of paleontologists has discovered that countless sea anemone fossils have been hiding in plain sight for nearly 50 years. It turns out that fossils long-interpreted as jellyfish were anemones. To do so, a team of scientists has simply turned the ancient animals upside down.

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Cartilaginous fish have changed much more in the course of their evolutionary history than previously believed. Evidence for this thesis has been provided by new fossils of a ray-like shark, Protospinax annectans, which demonstrate that sharks were already highly evolved in the Late Jurassic.

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By simulating early Earth conditions in the lab, researchers have found that without specific amino acids, ancient proteins would not have known how to evolve into everything alive on the planet today -- including plants, animals, and humans.

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A team of researchers is working to understand the details of the climate for the eastern portion of the United States from the Miocene, which unfortunately is a blank spot on paleo-climate maps. New findings suggest the future climate will be very close to the warmer, wetter, and more homogeneous climate similar to conditions experienced 5 million years ago.