Author: Tara Djokic, Scientific Officer, Palaeontology, Australian Museum; UNSW Sydney Hidden beneath farmland in the central tablelands of New South Wales lies one of Australia’s most extraordinary fossil sites – McGraths Flat. It dates back between 11 million and 16 million years into the Miocene epoch, a time when many of today’s familiar plants and […]
When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question. Fossils and DNA suggest people looking like us, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, archaeology – tools, artefacts, cave art – suggest that complex technology and cultures, “behavioural modernity”, evolved more […]
The cover of this post probably shows the world’s most famous carnivorous plant (Figure 1). It´s name is Audrey II and it appeared in the music film “Little shop of horrors”, directed by Franz Oz in 1986 adapting the film “The Little Shop of Horrors” directed by Roger Corman in 1960. Audrey II is a […]
The idea of a living fossil is rather intuitive. We think that a kind of organism deserves that denomination if it has been living in the planet during a very large period of time apparently without any change. A well known example of living fossil is the Ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba) because, although it is […]
DIPC Advanced materials • DIPC Electronic Properties • Materials
Picture this: Your home’s walls don’t just keep out the rain—they soak up warmth from the sun during the day, slowly release it to keep you cosy at night, and even convert some of that heat into a trickle of electricity to power your lights or charge your phone. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the […]
Author: Paul C. Sereno, Professor of Paleontology, University of Chicago Dinosaur “mummies” couldn’t have been further from my mind as I trudged up a grassy knoll on the Zerbst Ranch in east-central Wyoming, followed by University of Chicago undergraduates on a field trip linked to my “Dinosaur Science” course. As a university professor, I realized […]
Biology • Chemistry • Evolution • Geosciences • Microbiology • Planetary Science • Robotics
A new study has revealed potential chemical signatures of ancient Martian microbial life in rocks examined by NASA’s Perseverance rover. The findings, published by a large international team of scientists, focus on a region of Jezero Crater known as the Bright Angel formation—a name chosen from locations in Grand Canyon National Park because of the […]
Authors: Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Basran Burhan, PhD Candidate, Archaeology, Griffith University; Gerrit (Gert) van den Bergh, Researcher in Palaeontology, University of Wollongong; Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University, and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor in Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University Stone tools dating to at least 1.04 million years ago […]
Authors: Davide Foffa, Research Fellow in Palaeobiology, University of Birmingham; Alfio Alessandro Chiarenza, Royal Society Newton International Fellow in Palaeontology, UCL, and Emma Dunne, Assistant Professor in Paleobiology, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Ever since the first fragments of pterosaur bone surfaced nearly 250 years ago, palaeontologists have puzzled over one question: how did these close cousins of […]
All cellular life as we know it today stems from a single common ancestor, from which all modern lineages emerged. The origin of cellular life is thought to be the node in the Tree of Life from which Archaea and Bacteria, the two primary domains, diverged. The universality of some features across cellular life evidences […]