EARLY EARTH

News About The Primordial Earth

1,835 articles

Two new creatures discovered from dawn of animal life
Jun 20, 2018 (SPX)
The iconic Dickinsonia - large flat animals with a quilt-like appearance - were joined by tube-shaped organisms, frond-like creatures that looked more like plan...
Ancient panda skull reveals new giant panda lineage
Jun 18, 2018 (UPI)
Scientists were able to recover mitochondrial DNA from 22,000-year-old panda remains. The fossil was found in Cizhutuo Cave in China's Guangxi Province. Researc...
Volcanic activity, declining ocean oxygen triggered mass extinction of ancient organisms
Jun 14, 2018 (SPX)
Their only hint? Look to the past. In a study to be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Florida...
Bristol scientists discover a new way to find mass extinctions
Jun 14, 2018 (SPX)
A new mass extinction has been identified during the Triassic period, some 232 million years ago - called the Carnian event. It was less easy to identify becaus...
First tetrapods of Africa lived within the Devonian Antarctic Circle
Jun 12, 2018 (SPX)
"Whereas all previously found Devonian tetrapods came from localities which were in tropical regions during the Devonian, these specimens lived within the Antar...
Jurassic diet: Why our knowledge of what ancient pterosaurs ate might be wrong
Jun 12, 2018 (SPX)
New research, published in Biological Reviews and led by a team of palaeobiologists from the University of Leicester, has revealed that the diets of pterosaurs ...
Study suggests Earth could have supported continental crust, life earlier than thought
Jun 11, 2018 (SPX)
Counting strontium atoms in rocks from northern Canada, they found evidence that the Earth's continental crust could have formed hundreds of millions of years e...
Did extreme fluctuations in oxygen, not a gradual rise, spark the Cambrian explosion?
Jun 07, 2018 (SPX)
Now, a new study suggests that wild swings in oxygen levels may have sent life scrambling to adapt, leading to a major burst of diversity. That, says lead autho...
When did animals leave their first footprint on Earth?
Jun 07, 2018 (SPX)
Recently, an international research team reported discovering fossil footprints for animal appendages in the Ediacaran Period (about 635-541 million years ago) ...
Cornell research illuminates inaccuracies in radiocarbon dating
Jun 07, 2018 (SPX)
Archaeologist Sturt Manning and colleagues have revealed variations in the radiocarbon cycle at certain periods of time, affecting frequently cited standards us...
First large predators produced killer babies
Jun 05, 2018 (SPX)
The "creepy crawly" animal group known as the Arthropoda, which includes spiders, insects and crustaceans, has often been the inspiration behind many science fi...
UNM scientists find widespread ocean anoxia as cause for past mass extinction
May 29, 2018 (SPX)
Over the years, scientists have figured out the main causes of the mass extinctions, which include massive volcanic eruptions, global warming, asteroid collisio...
When the dinosaurs died, so did forests and tree-dwelling birds
May 29, 2018 (SPX)
"Looking at the fossil record, at plants and birds, there are multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the forest canopies collapsed," says Regan Dunn, a pale...
Utah fossil reveals global exodus of mammals' near relatives to major continents
May 29, 2018 (SPX)
The small fossil is evidence that the super-continental split likely occurred more recently than scientists previously thought and that a group of reptile-like ...
Major fossil study sheds new light on emergence of early animal life 540 million years ago
May 24, 2018 (SPX)
The Cambrian Explosion produced the largest and most diverse grouping of animals the Earth has ever seen: the euarthropods. Euarthropoda contains the insects, c...
Land rising above the sea 2.4 billion years ago changed planet Earth
May 24, 2018 (SPX)
In a study published in the May 24 issue of the journal Nature, researchers report that shale sampled from around the world contains archival quality evidence o...
Major shift in marine life occurred 33 million years later in the South
May 22, 2018 (SPX)
The Marine Mesozoic Revolution (MMR) is a key theory in evolutionary history. While dinosaurs ruled the land, profound changes occurred in the shallow seas that...
Europium points to new suspect in continental mystery
May 17, 2018 (SPX)
The find has weighty implications. If the iron content of continental rocks was a bit greater, as it is in the rocks beneath Earth's oceans, for example, our at...
Scientists' discovery in Yellowstone 'extremely relevant' to origin of life
May 17, 2018 (SPX)
Professor William Inskeep and his team of researchers published their findings May 14 in the scientific journal Nature Microbiology. "The discovery of archaeal ...
Jurassic fossil tail tells of missing link in crocodile family tree
May 14, 2018 (SPX)
The specimen - featuring a large portion of backbone - represents a missing link in the family tree of crocodiles, and was one of the largest coastal predators ...
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