Mammals' tusked ancestor roamed Australia

Scientists say rare fossils found in Tasmania's south-east prove that an ancient species of prehistoric animal did exist throughout Australia.  The dicynodont was an early ancestor of modern-day mammals and lived about 250 million years ago.  Roughly the size of a cow, the plant-eating animal had two tusks and a horny beak.

Earth-sized planets orbit distant star

The first two Earth-like worlds orbiting another star have been detected, although neither are believed to be suitable for life.

Wild rav­ens pur­pose­fully show ob­jects to their mat­ing part­ner­s

The class of be­hav­iours termed deic­tic ges­tures, which in­clude point­ing and show­ing, are aimed at draw­ing at­ten­tion to an ex­ter­nal ob­ject. Such ges­tures are thought to re­flect com­plex in­tel­li­gence and to rep­re­sent the start­ing point for the use of sym­bols and there­fore lan­guage.

Dog Origins: West or East Asia?

A group of re­search­ers claims to have con­firmed that the wolf an­ces­tors of to­day’s dogs can be traced to south­ern East Asia. But the find­ings contra­dict the­o­ries plac­ing the cra­dle of the ca­nine line in the Mid­dle East.

Two record-sized black holes identified

Two black holes al­most as hefty as 10 bil­lion or more Suns have been iden­ti­fied, break­ing records for black hole size.

Millennia of chaos may have finally brought down the dinosaurs

Co­los­sal vol­can­ic erup­tions and me­te­or­ite strikes are thought to have brought about dinosaur extinction.

Empathy In Rodents

Rats will free dis­tressed cage­mates from a trap, even when there’s no ev­i­dent re­ward for the help—and even when it might cost them a lit­tle food.

Face Recognition Found In Wasps

Primates have a face recognition system that enables them to distinguish between individuals, and now it seems that some wasps do too.

Earth-like planet orbiting Sun-like star

The most Earth-like planet ever discovered is circling a star 600 light years away, a key finding in an ongoing quest to learn if life exists beyond Earth.

Lapita find opens new chapter of Pacific history

A huge treasure trove of artefacts including thousands of fragments of pottery provides the first evidence that the sea-faring Lapita people settled in mainland Papua New Guinea.

Early humans were skilled deep-sea fishers

Prehistoric humans living more than 40,000 years ago had mastered the skills needed to catch fast-moving, deep ocean fish such as tuna.

Master hormone controls plant growth

A single hormone co-ordinates how a plant grows in response to the environment.

Turtle embryos tune in to heartbeats

Turtle embryos tune into each others' heartbeats so they are able to hatch at roughly the same time.

Play develops similarly in chimps and humans

The re­search­ers found that chim­pan­zee sol­i­tary play peaks in in­fan­cy, and the time spent in so­cial play is about the same be­tween in­fants and ju­ve­niles. But the type of so­cial play changed quite a bit as the an­i­mals grew up, in terms of meas­ures like com­plex­ity and play­mate choice.

Prehistoric “art workshop”

An ar­chae­o­log­i­cal site dis­cov­ered three years ago was ap­par­ent­ly a work­shop in which ear­ly hu­mans made, mixed and stored ochre, the ear­li­est form of paint.

“Dark matter” mystery deepens

Like all ga­lax­ies, most as­tro­no­mers be­lieve ours is filled with a strange, in­vis­i­ble sub­stance that be­trays its pres­ence only through its gravita­t­ional pull. The gal­ax­y’s stars would fly apart with­out this so-called dark mat­ter hold­ing them to­geth­er.  But the na­ture of “dark mat­ter” is a riddle—and a new study has only deep­ened the mys­tery.

“Junk DNA” may help explain human-chimp differences

For years, sci­en­tists thought an ex­plana­t­ion would soon turn up for the vast dif­fer­ences be­tween hu­mans and their clos­est rel­a­tives among the an­i­mals, such as chim­panzees. The dif­fer­ence must be in the genes, bi­ol­o­gists rea­soned.  But this hy­poth­e­sis ran in­to trou­ble when it lat­er emerged that hu­man and chimp genes are nearly iden­ti­cal.

First teeth grew outside of the body

The world's first teeth grew outside of the mouth before later moving into the oral cavity, new research on Early Devonian fish suggests.

Solar system may have ejected a giant planet

The so­lar sys­tem may have giv­en up a gi­ant plan­et and spared the Earth.

Physicists extract light from seeming emptiness

Phys­i­cists in Swe­den say they have man­aged to cre­ate light from vac­u­um, the clos­est thing to emp­ty space known to ex­ist.

Eris

A “d­warf plan­et” or­bit­ing our sun three times fur­ther away than the dis­tant dwarf plan­et Plu­to is around the same size as that better-known, frig­id world, as­tro­no­mers have found.

Surprisingly complex organic matter identified in space

Or­gan­ic mol­e­cules of un­ex­pected com­plex­ity — si­mi­lar to those that serve as the in­gre­di­ents of life — ex­ist through­out the uni­verse.

Embryonic solar system brimming with water

New find­ings sug­gest an em­bry­on­ic so­lar sys­tem con­tains thou­sands of oceans’ worth of wa­ter — so wa­ter-covered plan­ets like Earth may be com­mon.

Seeing An Object Vs Focusing Attention On It

Our brain's primary visual cortex probably focuses our attention rather than recognising what we see, a new study has found.

Shape-Shifting Material Reacts To Radiation

Physicists have engineered a new kind of artificial substance, called a magnetoelastic metamaterial, that can change its structure in response to varying levels of electromagnetic radiation, such as microwaves or visible light.

Palaeolithic Cave-Painters Were "Realists"

Ancient cave painters who drew spotted horses were depicting what they saw around them and were not, as often believed, being abstract or symbolic, suggests a new study.

Concestor Of All Crocodilians

An enormous prehistoric crocodile-like creature with a shield-like bony plate on its head, could be the last common ancestor of animals related to crocodiles and alligators.

Supermassive Black Hole Ripping Apart Entire Worlds

Sagittarius A, which is 4,000,000 times the mass of the Sun, is destroying planets and asteroids that have formed in a torus of dust and gas around the black hole.

Law Of Nature Not So Constant

According to standard model, the strength of electromagnetism - one of the four fundamental forces of nature - should be constant throughout the cosmos …

Primitive Planetesimal

A rare opportunity to observe the primordial asteroid Lutetia at close quarters has unveiled a remarkable rock that seems to be a precursor of a planet.

Archæopteryx Restored As 'First Bird'

A new evolutionary tree has once again defined archaeopteryx as the most primitive of birds.

Cycads Not So Ancient After All

It was thought that cycads — a group of non-flowering plants that resemble palms — had survived unchanged since they first appeared on Earth around 270 million years ago.

Tyrannosaurus Rex Was Bigger Than Previously Thought

T. rex grew bigger and faster than previously estimated, according to British and US scientists.

A New Discovery May Have Knocked Archaeopteryx Off The 'First Bird' Perch

As little as 15 years ago, the boundary between birds and dinosaurs was a fairly sharp one. On one side was Archaeopteryx, a 150 million-year-old magpie-sized creature from Bavaria, southern Germany, long considered the world's first bird. On the other was Deinonychus, an emu-sized meat-eating dinosaur or theropod, and a member of the group known as Dromaeosauridae.

Tool-Making Australopithecus Sediba

A well-preserved set of 1.98-million year old fossils may change our views of the origins of humans, by showing a combination of anatomical features never seen before.

Early Collisions May Have Caused The Realignment Of Uranus

As­tro­no­mers say they may have fig­ured out why the plan­et Ura­nus seems to be ly­ing on its side with re­spect to the Sun. A se­ries of bumps from oth­er so­lar sys­tem ob­jects early in its life could ex­plain the odd align­ment, they pro­pose.

A Dis­tant Blast Cre­at­ing Gravitational Waves May Have Al­ready Been De­tected

Al­though no in­stru­ments ex­isted at the time that could have pick­ed up the much-sought “gra­vit­a­tional waves,” the ex­plo­sion re­ported in 1987 may none­the­less have cre­at­ed them, two sci­en­tists claim. They the­o­rise that in the fu­ture, ob­serv­ations of si­m­i­lar ex­plo­sions could help con­firm pro­posed find­ings of gra­vit­at­ional waves.

Multiverse?

Scientists testing theory that there are multiple universes

The Higgs Boson Might Exist

New results from the world’s largest particle smasher might hint at the existence of the Higgs boson, which is thought to be responsible for endowing every other fundamental particle of matter with mass, or weight. This is according to the conventional thinking in physics, embodied in a set of ideas called the Standard Model. The Higgs boson is in fact the last particle that is predicted by the Standard Model but not yet detected.

The Compact Muon Solenoid Detector

The Higgs Boson Might Not Exist

Scientists chasing a particle they believe may have played a vital role in the creation of the universe say it might not exist after all.

Juramaia sinensis

The earliest known member of a lineage that includes humans and most other types of mammals was a shrew-like creature that likely scurried on trees at night as dinosaurs lurked.

Juramaia sinensis

Neanderthals' last stand possibly found

A Neanderthal-style toolkit found in the frigid far north of Russia's Ural Mountains dates to 33,000 years ago and may mark the last refuge of Neanderthals before they became extinct.

Modern Humans crowded out Europe's Neanderthals

A swell of modern humans outnumbered Neanderthals in Europe by nearly 10 to one, forcing their extinction 40,000 years ago

Brain waves from thoughts of sounds used to move cursor

A cursor on a computer screen can be controlled using thoughts about a range of vowel sounds, research has found.Brain signals have been translated into motion or even pictures before, but the current research showcases a nascent technique called electrocorticography.The approach uses sensors placed directly on the surface of the brain.

Is Homo floresiensis an Australopithecine?

1. Its adult body and brain proportions are comparable to those of the australopithecines, such as Lucy. Homo floresiensis is not descended from Homo erectus.

2. The shape of the brain case similar to Australopithecus.

3. The wrist bones do not have the palmar expansion, so Homo floresiensis may not have had the specialised form of precision grip found in modern humans. Homo floresiensis has features similar to australopithecines.

4. The brain size is similar to an australopithecine and a chimpanzee. At 380 cm³, is at the lower range of chimpanzees or the ancient australopithecines.

5. Its facial features include a medium-sized brow ridge, a retreating forehead, a small external ear opening (like an australopithecine and unlike modern humans).

6. In modern humans the symphysis — where the two halves of the lower jaw meet in the midline — is pulled forward at its lower margin to form a chin. In Homo floresiensis we see no trace of the modern human structure. Instead we see massive internal buttressing like australopithecines.

∞

A minority held viewpoint among palaeoanthropologists is that australopithecines moved outside of Africa. A notable proponent of this theory is Jens Lorenz Franzen, formerly Head of Paleoanthropology at the Research Institute Senckenberg. Franzen argues that robust australopithecines had reached not only Indonesia, as Meganthropus, but also China:

In this way we arrive at the conclusion that the recognition of australopithecines in Asia would not confuse but could help to clarify the early evolution of hominids ["hominins"] on that continent. This concept would explain the scanty remains from Java and China as relic of an Asian offshoot of an early radiation of Australopithecus, which was followed much later by an [African] immigration of Homo erectus, and finally became extinct after a period of coexistence.

Australopithecus sediba

Researchers have dated as 1.98 million years old a fossil that represents a candidate for oldest known direct human ancestor.

Australopithecus sediba

Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus

Males within two human ancestral species that existed roughly 2.7 to 1.7 million years ago were stay-at-home fellows, while females of these same species travelled

Early Cause Of Increase In Mammalian Brain Size

Selection for better olfactory abilities may have resulted in larger brain sizes in early mammals.

Aboriginal DNA dates Australian arrival

Sequencing of a West Australian Aboriginal man's hair shows he was directly descended from a migration out of Africa into Asia that took place about 70,000 years ago.

8.7 Million Species On Earth

Scientists have come up with the first precise, accurate and verifiable estimate of the number of species on Earth.

All Modern Life On Earth Derived From Common Ancestor

A single, primordial event likely yielded the array of organisms living today.

Humans came out of Africa via Arabia

An ancient toolkit unearthed in the United Arab Emirates suggests modern humans may have left Africa more than 100,000 years ago, much earlier than typically thought, say researchers.

Magpie Semiosis

Magpies use pointing to communicate danger.

Finch Semiosis

Scientists have discovered that songbirds are using their own form of grammar.

Elephant Semiosis

Scientists now believe elephants are in league with chimpanzees and dolphins as being among the world's most cognitively advanced animals.

Early Human Interbreeding

Interbreeding between ancestors of modern humans and our extinct evolutionary relatives happened much earlier — and more extensively — than previously thought.

Homo habilis

Sapiens-Neanderthalensis coupling rare

Modern humans may have some traces of genes from Neanderthals, but a new study suggests any breeding between the two was most likely a rare event. 

Facial "Expressions" Develop Before Birth

Fœtuses develop a range of facial movements in which one can identify facial ex­pressions such as laughter and crying.

First Planet Orbiting Two Suns Found

NASA’s Kepler mission has made the first clear detection of a “circumbinary” planet, a planet orbiting two stars.

Oldest flying insect fossil find

The oldest known full-body impression of a flying insect has been found preserved in 300 million-year-old sandstone.