An international team of researchers has reconstructed the common ancestor of placental mammals—an extremely diverse group including animals ranging from rodents to whales to humans—using the world's largest dataset of ...
Archaeology
Feb 7, 2013
1
0
The latest study of the microscopic wear patterns on the teeth of the American lions and saber-toothed cats that roamed North America in the late Pleistocene found that they were living well off the fat of the land in the ...
Archaeology
Dec 26, 2012
3
0
In the Jurassic era, even the flea was a beast, compared to its minuscule modern descendants. These pesky bloodsuckers were nearly an inch long.
Paleontology & Fossils
Feb 29, 2012
8
0
With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, from frogs and fish to tigers, some scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that occurred only five times before during ...
Ecology
Mar 2, 2011
55
0
(PhysOrg.com) -- Were dinosaurs endothermic (warm-blooded) like present-day mammals and birds or ectothermic (cold-blooded) like present-day lizards? The implications of this simple-sounding question go beyond deciding whether ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 11, 2009
1
1
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists in Uruguay studying extinct mammals called glyptodonts have discovered they used a "sweet spot" in their tails, just like baseball players use the center of percussion (CP), or sweet spot, in their ...
A multi-institutional team of biologists and life and environmental scientists has found that Singapore's rate of plant and animal extinction over the past 200 years is approximately 37%. This finding is published in the ...
When an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago, it set off a devastating mass extinction. The dinosaurs (except for a few birds) all died out, along with lots of the mammals. But some small mammals survived, laying the ...
Evolution
Oct 5, 2023
0
204
Large-bodied mammals play crucial roles in ecosystems. They create habitats, serve as prey, help plants thrive, and even influence how wildfires burn. But now, fewer than half of the large mammal species that were alive 50,000 ...
Ecology
Sep 6, 2023
0
71
A Cretaceous origin for placental mammals, the group that includes humans, dogs and bats, has been revealed by in-depth analysis of the fossil record, showing they co-existed with dinosaurs for a short time before the dinosaurs ...
Evolution
Jun 27, 2023
2
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