Animal Life news stories

A trio of evolutionary biologists at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology has learned more about the evolutionary history of tardigrades by studying two fossils embedded in amber. Their study is published in Communications Biology.

In stark contrast to the severe environmental destruction that we see all around us, our excavations reveal the ancestral Maya’s profound respect for nature and animals.

Researchers say they’ve recovered one of the world’s oldest known dinosaurs after heavy rains exposed a Herrerasaurid skeleton in southern Brazil.

Every now and again, our planet ponies up a fossil so spectacular that almost all you can do is gape in wonder. The research has been published in Nature.

Until now, scientists broadly accepted animals first emerged on Earth 635 million years ago. But a team, led by Cardiff University, has discovered evidence of a much earlier ecosystem in the Franceville Basin near Gabon on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa over 1.5 billion years earlier. Their study is presented in Precambrian Research.

Mark Twain wrote that “Man is the only animal that blushes – or needs to”. New research seems to have proved him wrong, however, with the discovery that hens have the capacity to blush and use other forms of facial expression.

Chugging quietly away in the dark depths of Earth’s ocean floors, a spontaneous chemical reaction is unobtrusively creating oxygen, all without the involvement of life. This unexpected discovery upends the long-standing consensus that it takes photosynthesizing organisms to produce the oxygen we need to breathe. This research was published in Nature Geoscience.

A study led by researchers from the UAB and the CSIC has revealed that the earliest Neolithic groups to settle some 7,000 years ago in the Pyrenean site of Coro Trasito (Tella, Huesca) used species selection strategies to manufacture their tools made out of bone and chose deer for the projectile tips.

A chance encounter in remote Australia, and years of painstaking analysis has pushed back evidence for the start of complex life on the planet by 750 million years.

Scientists have found a surprising connection between dinosaurs and ancient grapes. Fossilised seeds found in Central and South America hint that the mass extinction at the end of the “Age of Dinosaurs” might have created the conditions for ancient grapes to spread. See the study published in the journal Nature Plants.

A giant 280m-year-old salamander-like creature that was an apex predator before the age of the dinosaurs has been discovered by fossil hunters in Namibia.

The oldest example of figurative cave art has been discovered in the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi by Australian and Indonesian scientists. The painting of a wild pig and three human-like figures is at least 51,200 years old, more than 5,000 years older than the previous oldest cave art.

It sounds like a scene from a Spielberg film: an injured worker undergoes an emergency amputation, performed by one of her colleagues, allowing her to live another day. But this is not a human story – it is behaviour seen in ants.

A new study challenges the theory that dinosaur fossils inspired the legend of the mythological creature, the gryphon.

Details of an ancient cousin of modern-day mammals are being revealed for the first time. Hi-tech scanning of an ancient fossil, which was captured in sandstone around 252–254 million years ago, is giving experts valuable insight into the animal’s anatomy and evolution. The study, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

An international team of scientists has identified the oldest fossil of a sea-going reptile from the Southern Hemisphere—a nothosaur vertebra found on New Zealand’s South Island. 246 million years ago, at the beginning of the Age of Dinosaurs, New Zealand was located on the southern polar coast of a vast super-ocean called Panthalassa.