In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote. Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of…
More than three million years after her death, the early human ancestor known as Lucy is still divulging her secrets. In 2016, an autopsy indicated that the female Australopithecus afarensis, whose partial remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974 and is considered the most complete hominid fossil found to date, died from a fall out…
Around 76 million years ago, something took a bite out of a young pterosaur. Pterosaurs were large, flying reptiles that roamed our planet’s skies when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Some species were giants. But even their large size didn’t keep them off the menu. Paleontologists have discovered a tooth mark in a neck vertebra of…
Let’s be candid here. Vomit is something you want to get rid of. You don’t want it hanging around for a day, or an hour, or even a few minutes. And certainly not for 66 million years. And yet, scientists say, vomit that old has been found in the Cliffs of Stevns, a white chalk…
A new analysis of ancient fossils from China has sparked a keen debate over the very roots of humanity, CNN has reported. Fossils found in the 1970s, including skulls, teeth and jaw fragments, have long puzzled scientists. Now, researchers suggest they could belong to an entirely new species of early humans. The newly proposed species…
Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign…
Mark Sutton, an Imperial College London paleontologist, is not a punk. “I’m more of a folk and country person,” he said. But when Dr. Sutton pieced together 3-D renderings of a tiny fossil mollusk, he was struck by the spikes that covered its wormlike body. “This is like a classic punk hairstyle, the way it’s…
Quarry workers in England have discovered the clawed footprints of a 30-foot-tall predator and the sunken tracks of other dinosaurs, in what paleontologists are calling one of the most significant finds in Britain in nearly three decades. A trail of five distinct prints were uncovered last summer in a quarry in Oxfordshire, about 60 miles…