Related topics: species · fossil

DNA reveals the evolutionary history of museum specimens

Museum specimens held in natural history collections around the world represent a wealth of underutilized genetic information due to the poor state of preservation of the DNA, which often makes it difficult to sequence. An ...

Slender-snouted Besanosaurus was an 8-meter-long marine snapper

Middle Triassic ichthyosaurs are rare, and mostly small in size. The new Besanosaurus specimens described in the peer-reviewed journal PeerJ by Italian, Swiss, Dutch and Polish paleontologists provide new information on the ...

Fish have been swallowing microplastics since the 1950s

Forget diamonds—plastic is forever. It takes decades, or even centuries, for plastic to break down, and nearly every piece of plastic ever made still exists in some form today. We've known for a while that big pieces of ...

450-million-year-old sea creatures had a leg up on breathing

A new study has found the first evidence of sophisticated breathing organs in 450-million-year-old sea creatures. Contrary to previous thought, trilobites were leg breathers, with structures resembling gills hanging off their ...

New fossil seal species rewrites history

The discovery, published today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, radically changes scientists' understanding of how seal species evolved around the world.

Shining a (UV) light on the glow-in-the-dark platypus

The fur of the platypus—an Australian species threatened with extinction—glows green under ultraviolet light, a new study finds. This is the first observation of biofluorescence in an egg-laying mammal (monotreme), suggesting ...

page 10 from 24