Tag Archives: Ancient

Ancient DNA Solves Mystery of Hungarian, Finnish Language Family’s Origins  SciTechDaily Source link

A study has identified a new species of plesiosaur named Plesionectes longicollum that is thought to have swam the oceans during the Toarcian period, nearly 183 million years ago. Excavated from a quarry in Germany in 1978, the specimen has been stored in collections at the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History for almost 50 years. The new research investigates the anatomy …

The newly described Janjucetus dullardi is known from juvenile remains. This illustration depicts a J. dullardi calf with its mother. (Image credit: Artwork by Ruairidh Duncan. Source: Museums Victoria) Scientists have discovered a “deceptively cute” ancient whale with large eyes and razor-sharp teeth that devoured prey off Australia around 26 million years ago. The newly discovered Janjucetus dullardi is one …

The moment a creature dies, its DNA begins to break down. Half of it degrades every 521 years on average. By about 6.8 million years, even under ideal preservation conditions in cold, stable environments, every meaningful trace is gone. That’s a huge challenge when trying to understand our evolutionary history more deeply: Two-legged primates emerged 7 million years ago in …

AI Reveals New Secrets of the Nazca  Ancient Origins Source link

The human family tree is looking more and more like an unruly bush. Paleontologists have now uncovered the teeth of two different ancient human lineages at the same site in northeastern Ethiopia. The discovery collapses the distance between the first of our genus and the last of the australopithecines in eastern Africa. The two probably coexisted. Related: Lucy Is 50: …

Credit:  Biswarup Ganguly. In a clinic in Jaipur, a low, resonant note from a conch shell echoed through the room—and it’s all for an unlikely therapy. Researchers in India say shankh blowing—an ancient yogic practice of exhaling forcefully into a spiral-shaped conch—may help people with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), a disorder that causes repeated pauses in breathing during sleep. In …

Australian scientists have discovered a razor-toothed whale that prowled the seas 26 million years ago, saying Wednesday the species was “deceptively cute” but a fearsome predator. Museums Victoria pieced together the species from an unusually well-preserved skull fossil found on Victoria’s Surf Coast in 2019. In a study published Tuesday, scientists say they discovered a “fast, sharp-toothed predator” that would …

“Small and deceptively cute, but definitely not harmless” is how scientists have described a new species of ancient whale, from a 25-million-year-old fossil found on Victoria’s surf coast. This early species, called Janjucetus dullardi, was an extremely unusual animal, said Dr Erich Fitzgerald, senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Museums Victoria Research Institute. It was tiny – about the size …

Facebook Tweet Email Link For thousands of years, a disease repeatedly struck ancient Eurasia, quickly spreading far and wide. The bite of infected fleas that lived on rats passed on the plague in its most infamous form — the Black Death of the 14th century — to humans, and remains its most common form of transmission today. During the Bronze …