News
Fossil study finds dinosaur parents fed their young special diets
1+ day, 5+ hour ago (1198+ words) A new fossil study suggests baby duck-billed dinosaurs ate softer, richer foods than adults, hinting at bird-like parenting. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Maiasaura dinosaur teeth carry a quiet clue: babies were not eating what adults ate. Tiny wear marks suggest…...
Scientists solve the 30-year mystery of 'clockwork' earthquakes
2+ day, 18+ hour ago (1230+ words) Scientists found water-rich fault barriers that repeatedly stop magnitude 6 earthquakes on the Gofar transform fault. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Deep beneath the Pacific, one undersea fault has produced nearly identical magnitude 6 earthquakes every few years for decades. Researchers now think…...
Ancient fossils suggest complex life got its start on an oxygenated seafloor
2+ day, 21+ hour ago (972+ words) Fossils from ancient Australian seas suggest early eukaryotes depended on oxygen and lived mainly on the seafloor. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Early eukaryotes, the lineage that later gave rise to animals, plants and fungi, may have depended on oxygen from…...
Why flowering plants survived Earth's greatest extinction while dinosaurs did not
3+ day, 1+ hour ago (1203+ words) Ancient genome duplications may have helped flowering plants survive asteroid strikes, warming and cooling across Earth's history. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Flowering plants survived Earth's worst disasters, including the asteroid strike that ended the dinosaurs, while many others vanished. A…...
Geophysicists solve the mystery of a 75-year-old "gravity hole" in the Indian Ocean
4+ day, 5+ hour ago (1307+ words) The Indian Ocean Geoid Low spans 1. 2 million square miles where a deep gravity anomaly causes the sea surface to sink by as much as 106 meters. (CREDIT: AI generated via Midjourney) South of India, the ocean surface slumps into one of…...
Meet Nagatitan: Largest dinosaur ever discovered in Southeast Asia
1+ week, 3+ day ago (1179+ words) Stylized life reconstruction of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis gen. et. sp. nov. within the arid floodplains of late Early Cretaceous Aptian'Albian Thailand illustrated by Patchanop Boonsai. (CREDIT: Scientific Reports) A front leg bone nearly as tall as a person lay buried beside…...
The surprising reason why T. rex had short arms
1+ week, 4+ day ago (1075+ words) A new study argues T. rex evolved short arms to avoid serious injuries during violent group feeding on carcasses. (CREDIT: Shutterstock) For more than a century, Tyrannosaurus rex has carried one of paleontology's most stubborn visual jokes: a giant body, a…...
'Snowball Earth' repeatedly thawed during a 56-million-year ice age
1+ week, 6+ day ago (963+ words) Artist's rendition of a fully-frozen snowball Earth. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) For 56 million years, Earth appears to have lurched between two extremes that are hard to picture together: a planet sealed in global ice, then a world hot enough to…...
Researchers explain mysterious cause of 6, 000-kilometer cloud wall on Venus
2+ week, 1+ hour ago (1094+ words) Scientists say Venus" giant cloud front comes from a hydraulic jump, revealing a new driver of its fast-moving atmosphere. (CREDIT: NASA) A sharply defined cloud front on Venus, stretching about 6, 000 kilometers across, has puzzled planetary scientists since Japan"s Akatsuki…...
A violent volcanic eruption triggered a rare atmospheric cleanup
2+ week, 21+ hour ago (912+ words) The Hunga Tonga'Hunga Ha'apai-volcanic eruption on 15 january 2022. Image taken from a video of the eruption. (CREDIT: Tonga Geological Services) A towering plume from the 2022 Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai eruption did more than blast ash, seawater and gases deep into the atmosphere....