News
Meet Nagatitan: Largest dinosaur ever discovered in Southeast Asia
2+ day, 4+ hour 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
3+ day, 4+ hour 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
5+ day, 2+ hour 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
6+ day, 2+ 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
6+ day, 22+ 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....
Mercury has a 10-mile-thick layer of diamonds under its surface
1+ week, 1+ day ago (1088+ words) New analysis suggests Mercury may hold a deep diamond layer formed as its carbon-rich core slowly crystallized. (CREDIT: Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 4. 0) Mercury does not look like a world built for extravagance. It is small, battered, sun-scorched and gray. Yet far…...
Brazilian dinosaur discovery points to an ancient route from Europe to South America
1+ week, 1+ day ago (1016+ words) Artistic reconstruction of the new dinosaur from Maranh'o state. It was 20 meters long and had a European relative. (CREDIT: Jorge Blanco) A giant dinosaur lay buried about eight meters below a construction site in northeastern Brazil, hidden in sediments so…...
Human activity found to literally move mountains
1+ week, 3+ day ago (874+ words) Science in lofty heights: Samuel Weber installs a seismometer and a solar panel on the summit of the Matterhorn. (CREDIT: Jan Beutel / ETH Zurich) From a distance, the Matterhorn looks fixed in place, a giant wedge of rock planted above…...
New tool tracks lost continents and moving plates over the last 320 million years
1+ week, 6+ day ago (1088+ words) New tool tracks where any place on Earth sat up to 320 million years ago, helping decode ancient climate and fossil records. (CREDIT: Faculty of Geosciences Utrecht University) Latitude shapes climate in a basic but powerful way. It controls the angle…...
Spider and horseshoe crab relatives emerged 20 million years earlier than scientists thought
1+ week, 6+ day ago (1236+ words) Artistic reconstructions by M. Hattori illustrating oblique views of the dorsal (top) and ventral (bottom) morphologies. The sanctacaridid-like morphology of the posteriormost body region is speculative. (CREDIT: Nature) It looked, at first, like the sort of fossil Rudy Lerosey-Aubril knew well....