Animal Life news stories

An ancient gene stolen from bacteria set the stage for human sight
11th April 2023 | science.org | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth, Humans

The eye is so complex that even Charles Darwin was at a loss to explain how it could have arisen. Now, it turns out that the evolution of the vertebrate eye got an unexpected boost—from bacteria, which contributed a key gene involved in the retina’s response to light.

What did Homo sapiens eat 170,000 years ago? Roasted, supersized land snails
3rd April 2023 | sciencenews.org | Ancient, Animal Life, Humans

Until now, the oldest evidence of Homo sapiens eating land snails dated to roughly 49,000 years ago in Africa and 36,000 years ago in Europe. But tens of thousands of years earlier, people at a southern African rock shelter roasted these slimy, chewy — and nutritious — creepers that can grow as big as an adult’s hand, researchers report in the April 15 Quaternary Science Reviews.

Horses Transformed Native American Life Far Earlier Than We Thought, New Study Reveals
3rd April 2023 | sciencealert.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Humans

Native American people integrated horses into their communities much earlier than European colonial records suggest, according to an innovative study that combined archaeological and genetic analysis with Indigenous oral traditions.

Oldest Ichthyosaur Known to Science Discovered on Remote Arctic Island
28th March 2023 | sciencealert.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth

Bones found on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen suggest the ancient marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs roamed Earth’s oceans for much longer than we thought.

It Turns Out Mushrooms Have a Language—And We’re Just Figuring Out How to Decipher It
27th March 2023 doubleblindmag.com | Animal Life, Earth, Humans

It’s easy to see why most folks think of mushrooms as some type of weird plant, popping out from under the soil when it rains and found in the vegetable aisle of the grocery store…

Octopus Farming Is Deeply Disturbing. A Professor Explains Why.
24th March 2023 | sciencealert.com | Animal Life, Humans

Scientists at Dartmouth College in the US have studied how octopuses experience reality in a specialist lab…They question the appropriateness of this for a species that has a sophisticated capacity for processing information, rudimentary tool use, complex visual pathways and, not least, the capacity for pain.

‘Gargantuan’: China fossils reveal 70-tonne dinosaur had 15-metre neck
16th March 2023 | theguardian.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth

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.

Ancient Structures in The Arabian Desert Reveal Fragments of Mysterious Rituals
16th March 2023 | sciencealert.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Humans

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.

Ancient platypus-like fossil could rewrite the history of egg-laying mammals
11th March 2023 | livescience.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth

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.

Human temporal lobes are not very large in comparison with other primates
8th March 2023 phys.org | Ancient, Animal Life, Humans

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.

Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks
6th March 2023 | bbc.co.uk | Animal Life, Earth, Humans

Nations have reached a historic agreement to protect the world’s oceans following 10 years of negotiations. The High Seas Treaty aims to place 30% of the seas into protected areas by 2030, to safeguard and recuperate marine nature.

Evolution Could Predate Life Itself, Protein Discovery Suggests
6th March 2023 | sciencealert.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth, Humans

Together, amino acids form proteins that play many vital roles in organisms. This new study was designed to help establish why a specific group of 20 ‘canonical’ amino acids is used again and again to build proteins when there are so many more of these amino acids to pick from.

The world’s first horse riders found near the Black Sea
3rd March 2023 phys.org | Ancient, Animal Life, Humans

Researchers have discovered evidence of horse riding by studying the remains of human skeletons found in burial mounds called kurgans, which were between 4,500 and 5,000 years old.

The oldest known pollen-carrying insects lived about 280 million years ago
2nd March 2023 | sciencenews.org | Ancient, Animal Life, Earth

The oldest known fossils of pollen-laden insects are of earwig-like ground-dwellers that lived in what is now Russia about 280 million years ago, researchers report. Their finding pushes back the fossil record of insects transporting pollen from one plant to another, a key aspect of modern-day pollination, by about 120 million years.

Recently ‘Discovered’ Whale Behavior Was Actually Documented Thousands of Years Ago
1st March 2023 | sciencealert.com | Ancient, Animal Life, Humans

An unusual whale feeding technique only recorded for the first time in 2011 may have been around for at least two thousand years, according to researchers from Flinders University in Australia.

The study was published in Marine Mammal Science.

How Did Birds Get Wings? We May Have Found The ‘Missing Link’ in Dinosaur Fossils
28th February 2023 | sciencealert.com | Ancient, Animal Life

Dinosaur fossils featuring arms with a suspect bend at the elbow and wrist could hint at the presence of an unpreserved tendon that underpins all modern avian flight.

The study was published in Zoological Letters.

News stories covering Animal Science, bacterial life, DNA.