5+ hour, 15+ min ago  (836+ words) For years, paleontologists have been trying to piece together the story of one of the strangest groups of dinosaurs around " small, bird-like creatures with stubby arms and a single oversized claw. Now, a nearly complete 90-million-year-old skeleton from Patagonia is…...

11+ hour, 33+ min ago  (883+ words) Life in the ocean looked very different more than 600 million years ago. No fish swam in the water and no large animals moved across the seafloor. Some of the earliest animals were sponges, and new research shows that those first…...

13+ hour, 20+ min ago  (1140+ words) Moths and butterflies " collectively known as Lepidoptera " account for nearly 10% of all animal species on Earth. In some ecosystems, their caterpillars consume more living leaves than every other animal there combined. They live fast, too. In roughly 10% of Lepidoptera species,…...

18+ hour, 34+ min ago  (787+ words) Lunar rocks returned by Apollo astronauts have revealed that the early Moon's magnetic field surged to intensities stronger than Earth's before collapsing into long periods of weakness. That pattern resolves a decades-long dispute and shows that the Moon's interior was…...

1+ day, 13+ hour ago  (852+ words) Fossils long assumed to have vanished before a major mass extinction about 550 million years ago have now been found persisting until that event. That overlap transforms what once looked like a routine decline into what may be the first catastrophic…...

3+ day, 6+ hour ago  (825+ words) Deep in lakes and muddy sediments, certain bacteria navigate using an internal compass made of iron crystals. For decades, scientists have known these microbes align with Earth's magnetic field " but no one had directly measured how strong that tiny biological…...

3+ day, 10+ hour ago  (834+ words) A 16-million-year-old ant queen trapped in amber has revealed the first fossil trace of her kind in the Western Hemisphere. The discovery shows that these small ground-living ants were already part of Caribbean forests millions of years ago, widening the…...

3+ day, 11+ hour ago  (826+ words) Four fossil dinosaur eggs found together in Guadalajara, Spain, have been confirmed to come from two distinct kinds of long-necked dinosaurs. That rare, side-by-side pairing has turned a single nesting site into a new benchmark for understanding how Europe's last…...

3+ day, 15+ hour ago  (892+ words) Greenland's eastern edge rarely causes a stir. Then, with no warning, seismic instruments across the world lit up at the same time with a slow, steady rhythm that lasted for nine full days. The pulse rose and fell every ninety-two…...

3+ day, 23+ hour ago  (956+ words) For decades, scientists have tried to pinpoint when our ancestors first left Africa and spread into Eurasia. It is a turning point that reshaped human evolution. Now, new evidence from northern Israel suggests that moment came earlier than many believed....