Tag Archives: preserved

If life ever existed on Mars, traces of it might still be frozen beneath the planet’s icy surface. A new study from NASA and Penn State University suggests fragments of biomolecules from ancient microbes could survive in Martian ice for tens of millions of years — long enough for future missions to potentially find them, according to a statement from …

Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late ’00s. The community was working to get around Apple’s onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a …

A groundbreaking discovery of a 520-million-year-old larva fossil, with its brain and organs intact, is reshaping our understanding of arthropod evolution. Using advanced 3D imaging, scientists have revealed unprecedented details of this ancient specimen, offering new insights into the origins of modern arthropods. The study, published in Nature, marks a major milestone in paleontology. The Discovery of a Lifetime: Why …

A broken bone sets off a repair job inside the body. New blood vessels grow in, bringing oxygen and nutrients to rebuild the damage. Scientists have now traced that same process in a Tyrannosaurus rex rib from about 67 million years ago, using powerful X-rays to see mineral “shadows” where blood once flowed. They focused on a deep …

Despite the fact that much of the current research in paleontology focuses on trying to find traces of organic remains in fossils, dinosaur DNA has unfortunately never been recovered. A lot of what we know about dinosaurs comes from preserved bones and teeth that are dug out of the ground. These hard tissues alone, however, are limited in the information …

In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers from Harvard University and the Smithsonian Museum Conservation Institute have uncovered ancient proteins hidden in fossilized teeth, offering a deeper glimpse into the lives and evolutionary history of extinct animals. Published in the renowned journal Nature, their study reveals how proteins, long considered too fragile to survive millions of years, are preserved within the enamel …

Researchers have pulled the perfectly-preserved skull of an ice age horse from a mine in Yukon, Canada, new pictures show. Based on the soil around the skull and the depth of sediments where it was found, experts estimate that the horse lived about 30,000 years ago — but more precise radiocarbon dating could narrow this down, a spokesperson for the …

‘Zombie’ fungi that hijack insects are not just a modern forest horror story. A pair of tiny fossils locked in Burmese amber shows that these parasites stalked ants and flies nearly 100 million years ago in what is now Myanmar. The newly described fungi, Paleoophiocordyceps gerontoformicae and Paleoophiocordyceps ironomyiae, sprouted from their long‑dead hosts, just like today’s entomopathogenic relatives. This gruesome strategy …