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Fossil Science News
 | Deciphering microscopic clues hidden within fossils, scientists have uncovered the vibrant colors that adorned a feathered dinosaur extinct for 150 million years, a Yale University-led research team reports online Feb. 4 in the journal Science. ...> Full Article |
 | Ancient human teeth are telling secrets that may relate to modern-day health: Some stressful events that occurred early in development are linked to shorter life spans.
"Prehistoric remains are providing strong, physical evidence that people who acquired tooth enamel defects while in the womb or early childhood tended to die earlier, even if they survived to adulthood," says Emory anthropologist George Armelagos, who recently published the first summary of prehistoric evidence for the Barker hypothesis.
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A 60-million-year-old relative of crocodiles described this week by University of Florida researchers in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology was likely a food source for Titanoboa, the largest snake the world has ever known.
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 | Decaying corpses are usually the domain of forensic scientists, but palaeontologists have discovered that studying rotting fish sheds new light on our earliest ancestry. ...> Full Article |
 | Part of an ancient Roman law code previously thought to have been lost forever has been discovered by researchers at UCL's department of history. Simon Corcoran and Benet Salway made the breakthrough after piecing together 17 fragments of previously incomprehensible parchment. The fragments were being studied at UCL as part of the Arts & Humanities Research Council-funded "Projet Volterra" -- a 10-year study of Roman law in its full social, legal and political context. ...> Full Article |
 | The commonly held assumption that as primates evolved, their brains always tended to get bigger has been challenged by a team of scientists at Cambridge and Durham. Their work helps solve the mystery of whether Homo floresiensis -- dubbed the Hobbit due to its diminutive stature -- was a separate human species or a diseased individual. ...> Full Article |
 | The color of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time, reports a paper published in Nature this week. ...> Full Article |
 | The last Neanderthals in Europe died out at least 37,000 years ago -- and both climate change and interaction with modern humans could be involved in their demise, according to new research from the University of Bristol published today in PLoS ONE. ...> Full Article |
 | A joint team from the University of Kansas and Northeastern University in China says that it has settled the long-standing question of how bird flight began. ...> Full Article |
Is the current flora of New Zealand derived from plants that grew on the supercontinent Gondwana before its breakup, or derived from plants that more recently dispersed to New Zealand? Discovery of new macrofossils and/or detailed examinations of fossil pollen combined with evolutionary analyses may help to answer questions of whether the ancestors of current plants coexisted with dinosaurs in New Zealand.
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 | A new scientific paper co-authored by a University of Adelaide researcher reports strong evidence that humans, not climate change, caused the demise of Australia's megafauna -- giant marsupials, huge reptiles and flightless birds -- at least 40,000 years ago. ...> Full Article |
 | A team of chemists from the University of Valencia has confirmed that the substance used to hermetically seal an amphora found among remains at Lixus, in Morocco, was pine resin. The scientists also studied the metallic fragments inside the 2,000-year-old vessel, which could be fragments of material used for iron-working. ...> Full Article |
 | New biogeographic evidence supports the origin of primates in the Jurassic and the evolution of the modern primate groups -- prosimians, tarsiers, and anthropoids -- by the early Cretaceous. ...> Full Article |
 | University of Utah scientists discovered that air flows in one direction as it loops through the lungs of alligators, just as it does in birds. The study suggests this breathing method may have helped the dinosaurs' ancestors dominate Earth after the planet's worst mass extinction 251 million years ago. ...> Full Article |
 | There's more to the eye makeup that gave Queen Nefertiti and other ancient Egyptians royals those stupendous gazes and legendary beauty than meets the eye. Scientists in France are reporting that the alluring eye makeup also may have been used to help prevent or treat eye disease by doubling as an infection-fighter. Their findings are scheduled for the Jan. 15 issue of ACS' Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal. ...> Full Article |
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