News Desk

A dinosaur that roamed east Asia more than 160m years ago has been named a contender for the animal with the longest neck ever known.

The desert in southern Egypt is filled with hundreds of petroglyphs and inscriptions dating from the Neolithic to the Arab period. The oldest date is from the fifth millennium B.C. and few have been studied.

A new study published in the journal Nature brings scientists one step closer to answering that question. Led by the University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Geology Megan Newcombe, researchers analyzed melted meteorites that had been floating around in space since the solar system’s formation 4 1/2 billion years ago.

According to an in-depth new analysis, the mysterious, rectangular enclosures were used by Neolithic people for unknown rituals, depositing animal offerings, perhaps as votives to an unknown deity or deities.

“We live in a society where religion and spirituality are taboo and something we rarely talk about with each other. What we believe in, why we are here, what happens when we die. And we might be led to believe that it’s not important, or something we shouldn’t concern ourselves with in the healthcare system. But our study convincingly shows that these topics are important…”

A new study has found that if Venus ever did have habitable conditions, and liquid water on its surface, it was a long time ago, and lasted only briefly before the planet transformed into the parched, arid world it is today.

Glimpsed only occasionally at the hearts of massive clusters of galaxies, ultramassive black holes are some of the largest and most elusive objects in the universe…Now, researchers studying a rare galaxy merger with three supermassive black holes at its center may have finally discovered the origins of these cosmic monsters.

Fossils of a 70 million-year-old platypus relative called Patagorhynchus pascuali found in South America show that egg-laying mammals evolved on more than one continent.

Archaeologists have analyzed 2,900-year-old stone carvings and a long-ignored chisel from the Iberian Peninsula, revealing that local craftspeople produced steel long before previously thought.

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a temple dating back around 2,700 years, to a time when a kingdom called Kush ruled over a vast area, including what is now Sudan, Egypt and parts of the Middle East.

Scandinavian scientists said Wednesday that they have identified the oldest-known inscription referencing the Norse god Odin on part of a gold disc unearthed in western Denmark in 2020.

We’ve got a curious case of mistaken identity to report. Fossils previously believed to have been left by prehistoric tentacle-bearing aquatic invertebrates called Bryozoans may, in fact have been created by a different source: seaweed. See research here.

An archaeology project is to make its final excavation of a 5,000-year-old Neolithic site in Orkney next year.

It had been thought to date that the species Homo sapiens has disproportionately large temporal lobes compared to other anthropoid primates, the group including anthropomorphic monkeys and apes. A new study, one of whose authors is Emiliano Bruner, a paleoneurologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), contradicts that hypothesis.

For the first time, astronomers have caught a glimpse of shock waves rippling along strands of the cosmic web — the enormous tangle of galaxies, gas and dark matter that fills the observable universe.

Ice skates made of bone have been unearthed from a Bronze Age tomb in western China, suggesting an ancient technological exchange between the east and west of Eurasia.