The island of Sicily is considered to be among the first occupied by humans in the European Upper Paleolithic. Studies to understand early occupation of the island are mostly concentrated on the northern shores. An international team of archaeologists led by Washington University in St. Louis has now searched for the human occupation traces in

A team of biologists in Israel has grown an extinct — or at least extirpated — tree species of the myrrh genus Commiphora from an ancient seed found in the northern Judean Desert in the 1980s. Morphological features of Sheba at different ages: (a) ancient seed prior to planting; (b) developing seed at 5 weeks

Carbonate minerals are of particular interest in paleoenvironmental research as they are an integral part of the carbon and water cycles, both of which are relevant to habitability. In new research, planetary scientists focused on carbon and oxygen isotope measurements of carbonate minerals detected by NASA’s Curiosity rover within the Gale crater on Mars. An

A team of researchers at CSIRO has decoded the genome of the spotted handfish (Brachionichthys hirsutus), a critically endangered species of marine fish endemic to Tasmania. The spotted handfish (Brachionichthys hirsutus). Image credit: CSIRO. Brachionichthys hirsutus is a rare species of benthic fish in the handfish family Brachionichthyidae. This unusual fish lives only in the

Paleontologists have described a new genus and species of long-snouted notosuchian from the fragmentary remains found in Brazil’s Adamantina Formation. Epoidesuchus tavaresae is a new species of Peirosauridae from the Cretaceous Adamantina Formation, Brazil. Image credit: Ruiz et al., doi: 10.1002/ar.25559. Epoidesuchus tavaresae inhabited the ancient supercontinent Gondwana during the Late Cretaceous epoch, around 72

Two injured individuals of Mnemiopsis leidyi , a species of planktonic animals known as comb jellies or ctenophores, are capable of rapidly fusing into a single entity in which some physiological functions are integrated, according to new research. While maintaining a population of Mnemiopsis leidyi in a seawater tank, Jokura et al. noticed an atypically

New research by paleontologists from the University of Leicester, the University of Birmingham and Liverpool John Moores University demonstrates an unexpectedly high degree of variation in the hands and feet of pterosaurs, comparable with that observed in living birds. The discovery indicates that pterosaurs were not confined to a life in the skies but were

A team of marine biologists led by a Florida International University researcher has described a new species of the shark genus Sphyrna from the Caribbean and the Southwest Atlantic. Sphyrna alleni, a male collected in Riversdale, Belize. Image credit: Cindy Gonzalez. Named for the unusual and distinctive form of their heads, hammerhead sharks belong to