The earth doesn't give up its secrets easily—not even in the "Cradle of Humankind" in South Africa, where a wealth of fossils relating to human evolution have been found.
Paleontology & Fossils
Jun 27, 2022
0
4168
Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid hit the Earth with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs and changed the course of evolution. The skies darkened and plants stopped photosynthesising. The plants died, then the animals ...
Evolution
Nov 26, 2022
4
389
A total solar eclipse plunged Antarctica from summer into darkness early Saturday in a rare astronomical spectacle witnessed by a handful of scientists and thrill-seekers—and countless penguins.
Space Exploration
Dec 4, 2021
2
2308
The mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period 252 million years ago—one of the great turnovers of life on Earth—appears to have played out differently and at different times on land and in the sea, according to ...
Archaeology
Mar 26, 2020
6
2737
Scientists today announced that the Rising Star Cave system has revealed yet more important discoveries, only a year and a half after it was announced that the richest fossil hominin site in Africa had been discovered, and ...
Archaeology
May 9, 2017
5
1268
In a study published today in Current Biology, researchers from University of Sydney have identified the single gene that determines how Cape honey bees reproduce without ever having sex. One gene, GB45239 on chromosome 11, ...
Plants & Animals
May 7, 2020
3
2326
Many people living today have a small component of Neanderthal DNA in their genes, suggesting an important role for admixture with archaic human lineages in the evolution of our species. Paleogenetic evidence indicates that ...
Evolution
Sep 5, 2022
1
1581
In 1924, a three-year-old child's skull found in South Africa forever changed how people think about human origins.
Archaeology
Dec 24, 2019
8
3950
A team of researchers from several institutions in the U.K. and one in South Africa has come to the conclusion that the broiler chicken offers perhaps the most striking evidence of the rise of the Anthropocene. In their paper ...
The Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week is the longest-running cable television series in history, filling screens with sharky content every summer since 1988. It causes one of the largest temporary increases in U.S. viewers' ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 1, 2022
11
600
