EARLY EARTH - INDO DAILY

After the age of dinosaurs came the age of ant farmers

Jul 21, 2016 (SPX)

A group of South American ants has farmed fungi since shortly after the dinosaurs died out, according to an international research team including Smithsonian sc...

For ancient deep-sea plankton, a long decline before extinction

Jul 21, 2016 (SPX)

A new study of nearly 22,000 fossils finds that ancient plankton communities began changing in important ways as much as 400,000 years before massive die-offs e...

Ancient rocks reveal how Earth recovered from mass extinction

Jul 21, 2016 (SPX)

Scientists have shed light on why life on Earth took millions of years to recover from the greatest mass extinction of all time. The study provides fresh insigh...

The success of the plant-eating dinosaurs

Jul 19, 2016 (SPX)

There has been a long debate about why dinosaurs were so successful. Say dinosaur, and most people think of the great flesh-eaters such as Tyrannosaurus rex, bu...

Queen's researcher examines the evolution of flight

Jul 19, 2016 (SPX)

Research by post-doctoral fellow Alexander Dececchi challenges long-held hypotheses about how flight first developed in birds. Furthermore, his findings raise t...

Winged flight may be an accident of evolution

Jul 18, 2016 (UPI)

New research undermines the ways scientists have previously attempted to explain the evolution of flight. Wings may have evolved for purposes other than flight,...

Soot may have snuffed out the dinosaurs

Jul 15, 2016 (UPI)

Because there weren't enough already, scientists in Japan have offered a new theory for how dinosaurs met their demise. Massive amounts of stratospheric soot sp...

Study reveals origins of the turtle shell

Jul 15, 2016 (UPI)

No other animal grows armor quite like the turtle. Despite its obvious protective benefits, new research suggests the adaptation was originally adopted for burr...

Testing ideas about the evolution of long-necked sauropod dinosaurs

Jul 14, 2016 (SPX)

Sauropod dinosaurs were the largest land-dwelling animals of all time, with highly elongated necks and tails that were held suspended above the ground. Holding ...

Scared out of its skin, ancient insect escaped sticky doom

Jul 14, 2016 (UPI)

Fifty million years ago, one lucky -- and frightened -- insect avoided amber entombment. Though the stick bug wasn't embalmed, the remnant of its close call was...

Ancient supernovae buffeted Earth's biology with radiation dose

Jul 14, 2016 (SPX)

Research published in April provided "slam dunk" evidence of two prehistoric supernovae exploding about 300 light years from Earth. Now, a follow-up investigati...

Bird research suggests calling dinosaurs may have been tight-lipped

Jul 14, 2016 (SPX)

Dinosaurs are often depicted in movies as roaring ferociously, but it is likely that some dinosaurs mumbled or cooed with closed mouths, according to a study pu...

New dinosaur had 'T. rex arms' that evolved independently

Jul 13, 2016 (UPI)

Scientists aren't sure why Tyrannosaurus rex grew such small, stubby arms, but the short, stunted, two-clawed limbs were useful enough to evolve multiples times...

Recreating ancient vertebrate's first step on dry land

Jul 12, 2016 (SPX)

Could a tail have allowed ancient vertebrates to make the transition from water to land? Reporting in Science today, researchers from Georgia Institute of Techn...

Evolution may have moved at a furious pace on a much warmer Earth

Jul 11, 2016 (SPX)

Early life forms on Earth are likely to have mutated and evolved at much higher rates than they do today, suggests a new analysis from researchers at the Univer...

What really killed the dinosaurs

Jul 11, 2016 (SPX)

University of Florida geochemist Andrea Dutton and colleagues at the University of Michigan have utilized a new technique of analysis to reconstruct Antarctic o...

Weathering of rocks by mosses may explain climate effects during the Late Ordovician

Jul 11, 2016 (SPX)

During the Ordovician period, the concentration of CO2 in the earth's atmosphere was about eight times higher than today. It has been hard to explain why the cl...

The secret to an Oesia life: Prehistoric worm built tube-like 'houses' on sea floor

Jul 11, 2016 (SPX)

The fossilised remnants of tube-like "dwellings" which housed a primitive type of prehistoric sea worm on the ocean floor have been identified in a new study. A...

Study: Dinosuars may have been cooers and mumblers, not roarers

Jul 11, 2016 (UPI)

New research suggests closed-mouth sounds made by modern birds may be analogous to dinosaur vocalization. Dinos might have been tight-lipped cooers and mumblers...

Robot helps study how first land animals moved 360 million years ago

Jul 11, 2016 (SPX)

When early terrestrial animals began moving about on mud and sand 360 million years ago, the powerful tails they used as fish may have been more important than ...