SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
People in Ethiopia did not live in low valleys during the last ice age. Instead they lived high up in the inhospitable Bale Mountains. There they had enough water, built tools out of obsidian and relied mainly on giant rodents for nourishment. This discovery was made by an international team of researchers led by Martin … Read more
The Devonian period, which was 419 million to 359 million years ago, is best known for Tiktaalik, the lobe-finned fish that is often portrayed pulling itself onto land. However, the “age of the fishes,” as the period is called, also saw evolutionary progress in plants. Researchers reporting August 8 in the journal Current Biology describe the largest … Read more
Paleobotanist Az Klymiuk didn’t set out to upend science’s understanding of the fossil record of plant-fungal associations. She just wanted to figure out the environment that some fossil plants lived in. That question led her to look at modern cattail roots and the fungi that live inside of them. She found that fungi have a … Read more
A lizard-like animal that lived 289 million years ago suffered from a bone condition similar to Paget’s disease, according to a study published August 7, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Yara Haridy of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin and colleagues. This is the most ancient known case of such a disease. The animal … Read more
Australasian palaeontologists have discovered the world’s largest parrot, standing up to 1m tall with a massive beak able to crack most food sources. The new bird has been named Heracles inexpectatus to reflect its Herculean myth-like size and strength – and the unexpected nature of the discovery. “New Zealand is well known for its giant … Read more
Evidence of extreme warfare tactics in the Maya lowlands, during a time described as a peak in prosperity and artistic sophistication, is described in a paper published online this week in Nature Human Behaviour. This research suggests that the Maya engaged in violent warfare that resulted in widespread destruction of a city much earlier than previously thought. … Read more
Larisa DeSantis, a Vanderbilt University paleontologist, grew up visiting the one-of-a-kind fossil site in Los Angeles, which contains fossils of predators that tried to eat horses, bison and camels stuck in the tar over the past 50,000 years and themselves became trapped, offering the best opportunity to understand Ice Age animals facing climate change. The … Read more
The discovery of fossilized plants in Labrador, Canada, by a team of McGill directed paleontologists provides the first quantitative estimate of the area’s climate during the Cretaceous period, a time when the earth was dominated by dinosaurs. The specimens were found in the Redmond no.1 mine, in a remote area of Labrador near Schefferville, in … Read more
The geographic origins of the metals in Scandinavian mixed-metal artifacts reveal a crucial dependency on British and continental European trading sources during the beginnings of the Nordic Bronze Age, according to a study published July 24, 2019 in the open-access journal PLOS ONEby Heide W. Nørgaard from Aarhus University, Denmark, and colleagues. 2000-1700BC marks the earliest … Read more
Researchers from the National Museums of Kenya, University of Arkansas, University of Missouri and Duke University have announced the discovery of a tiny monkey that lived in Kenya 4.2 million years ago. Nanopithecus browni was the same size as a modern talapoin monkey, the smallest living Old World monkey species that weighs only 2 to 3 … Read more