Africa is home to more than 20% of the world's bat population. There are more than 200 species to be found on the continent. South Africa is particularly diverse, with 72 bat species.
Paleontology & Fossils
Apr 18, 2024
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1
South Africa's Cape south coast offers many hints about how our human ancestors lived some 35,000 to 400,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch. These clues are captured in the dunes they once traversed, today cemented ...
Archaeology
Apr 1, 2024
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183
Scientists have long debated the Anthropocene Epoch, a proposed unit of geologic time corresponding to the most recent period in history. It's characterized by substantial human impact on the planet.
Earth Sciences
Oct 25, 2023
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35
Snakes are familiar, distinctive—and often feared—reptiles. And they've been around for a long time: body fossils found in the UK, Portugal and the US stretch all the way back to the late Jurassic period, about 150 million ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Oct 6, 2023
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256
While ravens do not occur in China's capital Beijing today, a new study analyzing fossil bird bones from the UNESCO World Heritage Zhoukoudian "Peking Man" site demonstrates that ravens lived in western Beijing at the same ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 1, 2023
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436
Tens of thousands of years ago, a huge horse species walked, trotted and galloped across the shifting sands of what is today South Africa's Cape south coast.
Evolution
Mar 17, 2023
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309
Some people are annoyed when they encounter a fresh pile of dung while out on a walk in nature. Others are excited because it points to the recent visit of a particular kind of animal. But some scientists, myself included, ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jan 20, 2023
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22
If you take a magnifying glass and a flashlight and look at your teeth very carefully in the mirror, in places you can spot a pattern of fine, parallel lines running across your teeth. These correspond to the striae of Retzius ...
Archaeology
Jan 16, 2023
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121
Around 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Now, a research team studying the distribution ...
Earth Sciences
Nov 2, 2021
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1216
When the brightness of the star Betelgeuse dropped dramatically a few months ago, some observers suspected an impending supernova—a stellar explosion that could also cause damage on Earth. While Betelgeuse has returned ...
General Physics
Sep 30, 2020
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