Some cities only last a century or two, while others last for a thousand years or more. Often, there aren't clear records left behind to explain why. Instead, archaeologists piece together clues from the cities' remains to ...
Archaeology
Mar 3, 2023
0
181
The pink-throated brilliant hummingbird, Heliodoxa gularis, has, unsurprisingly, a brilliant pink throat. So does its cousin, the rufous-webbed brilliant hummingbird, Heliodoxa branickii. When scientists found a Heliodoxa ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 28, 2023
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60
Antarctica is a tough place to work, for obvious reasons—it's bitterly cold, remote, and wild. However, it's one of the best places in the world to hunt for meteorites. That's partly because Antarctica is a desert, and ...
Planetary Sciences
Jan 18, 2023
3
835
In many ways, Madagascar is a biologist's dream, a real-life experiment in how isolation on an island can spark evolution. About 90% of the plants and animals there are found nowhere else on Earth. But these plants and animals ...
Evolution
Jan 10, 2023
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107
Deep beneath the waves, tiny clams with shells usually about as big as a pea bore into pieces of sunken wood. The wood is food for them, as well as a home. These rare, scattered, sunken pieces of wood support miniature ecosystems ...
Evolution
Dec 15, 2022
0
116
Asexual reproduction is common for animals like starfish, deep-sea worms, and stick insects, but among vertebrates, it's a rarity. A process called parthenogenesis allows some female animals to fertilize an egg with their ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 15, 2022
0
53
The idea that climate change and geological events can shape evolution isn't a new one: anyone who's heard of dinosaurs knows that a big change in the environment (like, say, a meteor hitting the Earth 66 million years ago ...
Evolution
Nov 28, 2022
0
60
Jeholornis was a raven-sized bird that lived 120 million years ago, among the earliest examples of dinosaurs evolving into birds, in what's now China. The fossils that have been found are finely preserved but smashed flat, ...
Evolution
Oct 24, 2022
0
243
A big part of evolution is competition— when there are limited resources to go around, plants and animals have to duke it out for nutrients, mates, and places to live. That means that the flower-covered meadows of China's ...
Ecology
Oct 24, 2022
0
21
SUE the T. rex is one of the most complete, best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex specimens ever found. That level of preservation helps reveal details about SUE's life. For instance, SUE lived to a ripe old age of about thirty-three, ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Sep 30, 2022
5
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