The wreck of Captain James Cook’s Endeavour is under threat not just from shipworms, but also from fish, crustaceans, and the ocean itself, maritime archaeologists warn. The wooden ship rests off the coast of Rhode Island, in the US, and is already worm-eaten. Experts from the Australian National Maritime Museum say time is critical in […]
Etiket: animals
Is that a facehugger?! How the monster from Alien turned up in the Gulf of Mexico | Animals
Name: Bathynomus yucatanensis. Yikes! What the hell is that? Can we do this properly, the Pass notes way? Sorry. Age: Somewhere near the 160m year mark. From fossil records, that’s how long giant isopods are calculated to have been around. Isopod? It’s a type of crustacean. And bathynomus yucatanensis is a giant one of those? […]
The longest living animals on Earth
The animal kingdom boasts some incredibly long lifespans that far exceed the average human’s. While humans may have an “absolute limit” of 150 years (opens in new tab), this is just a blink of an eye compared with the centuries and millennia that some animals live through; and some animals can even stop or reverse […]
What’s the biggest group of animals ever recorded on Earth?
In early 2020, ornithologist Noah Strycker found himself walking amongst several thousand chinstrap penguins on Elephant Island, a remote blip of snow-covered rock just off the Antarctic Peninsula. He was there to carry out a census of the island’s penguin colony, which hadn’t been properly surveyed since 1970. “I’ll never forget the sight, sound, and…smell,” […]
Cretaceous period: Animals, plants and extinction event
The Cretaceous period was the last and longest segment of the Mesozoic era. It lasted approximately 79 million years, from the minor extinction event that closed the Jurassic period about 145 million years ago to the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) extinction event 66 million years ago. The name comes from “creta,” the Latin word for chalk, because […]
Mummified mice found in ‘beautiful, colourful’ Egyptian tomb
Recently discovered tomb of official dating back more than 2,000 years contains dozens of animals and two mummies Dozens of mummified mice were among the animals found in an ancient Egyptian tomb that was unveiled on Friday. The well-preserved and finely painted tomb near the Egyptian town of Sohag – a desert area near the […]
Ancient Chinese cat bones shake up domestication theory
Fossil discovery an ‘important step’ in understanding feline transformation from pest-control to pet A cat-and-mouse game played out in a Chinese village 5,300 years ago is helping scientists understand how wild felines became the tame pets we know today. Scientists believe it was the cat’s appetite that led to domestication. Grain stored by ancient farmers […]
Neanderthals dived for shells to make tools, research suggests
Study adds weight to claims that stereotype of knuckle-headed Neanderthals is wrong Neanderthals went diving for shells to turn into tools, according to new research, suggesting our big-browed cousins made more use of the sea than previously thought. The study focuses on 171 shell tools that were found in a now inaccessible coastal cave in central […]
Neanderthals Hunted Fallow Deer
In a study published June 25 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, an international team of researchers reports lesions observed on two fallow deer skeletons from Neumark-Nord, Germany, unearthed during excavations of 120,000-year-old lake shore deposits with traces of Neanderthal presence. A detailed analysis of the lesions demonstrates that they resulted from the close-range use of thrusting […]
Mediterranean Sea for Clam Shells
Shell fishing was a common activity of Neanderthals, according to new research led by University of Colorado, Boulder archaeologists. In 1949, archaeologists working at the site of Grotta dei Moscerini, a cave in the Latium region of central Italy, found a large collection of unusual artifacts: 171 shells of the smooth clam (Callista chione) that Neanderthals had […]