The death march of a segmented bilaterian animal unearthed from ~550-million-year-old rocks in China shows that the oldest mobile and segmented animals evolved by the Ediacaran Period (635-539 million years ago). The research was published in Nature on Sept. 4…
Tag: OLD WORLD
Ancient animal species: Fossils dating back 550 million years among first animal trails
In a remarkable evolutionary discovery, a team of scientists co-led by a Virginia Tech geoscientist has discovered what could be among the first trails made by animals on the surface of the Earth roughly a half-billion years ago. Shuhai Xiao,…
Livestock bones help date the earliest spread of millet grains outside China
You are what you eat — and sometimes what animals eat — so much so that clues from ancient animal bones can be used to determine how and when humans began growing certain crops in earnest. New research from Washington…
Clues to early social structures may be found in ancient extraordinary graves
Elaborate burial sites can provide insight to the development of socio-political hierarchies in early human communities, according to a study released August 28, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by an international team of archaeologists, anthropologists and neuroscientists of…
Crack in Pacific seafloor caused volcanic chain to go dormant
UH geologists discover 10 million years of silence
Ancient feces reveal how ‘marsh diet’ left Bronze Age Fen folk infected with parasites
New research published today in the journal Parasitology shows how the prehistoric inhabitants of a settlement in the freshwater marshes of eastern England were infected by intestinal worms caught from foraging for food in the lakes and waterways around their…
Neanderthals commonly suffered from ‘swimmer’s ear’
Abnormal bony growths in the ear canal were surprisingly common in Neanderthals, according to a study published August 14, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Erik Trinkaus of Washington University and colleagues. External auditory exostoses are dense bony…