EARLY EARTH - INDO DAILY

Nitrogen factories in the Cretaceous oceans

Mar 25, 2016 (SPX)

Researchers have discovered a 'bizarre' microorganism which plays a key role in the food web of Earth's oceans. Researchers from Spain's Institute of Marine Sci...

Ancient seaweed fossils some of the oldest of multicellular life

Mar 24, 2016 (SPX)

Honing in on when life on Earth evolved from single-celled to multicellular organisms is no easy task. Organisms that old lacked many distinguishing characteris...

Need to identify a fossil? There's an app for that

Mar 23, 2016 (UPI)

Researchers have designed a mobile app to help fossil hunters identify finds. Students from Ohio University teamed up with researchers at San Jose State Univers...

Parasites reveal how evolution has molded an ancient nuclear structure

Mar 23, 2016 (SPX)

Long before animals evolved from sponges, and before plants evolved out of algae, there was a pivotal event that allowed complex, multicellular organisms to ari...

Where did the 'Siberian unicorn' disappear?

Mar 21, 2016 (SPX)

The beautiful title "Siberian unicorn" belongs to Elasmotherium sibiricum - an elasmotherium Siberian rhinoceros, which as previously thought became extinct 350...

Chinese buyers storm world's largest amber fair

Mar 18, 2016 (AFP)

Chinese buyers have descended on the world's largest amber fair this week in the Polish Baltic port city of Gdansk, amid a boom that has seen the price of the f...

Photosynthesis more ancient than thought, and most living things could do it

Mar 18, 2016 (SPX)

Photosynthesis is the process by which plants, algae and cyanobacteria use the energy from the Sun to make sugar from water and carbon dioxide, releasing oxygen...

Young sun-like star shows a magnetic field was critical for life on the early Earth

Mar 18, 2016 (SPX)

Nearly four billion years ago, life arose on Earth. Life appeared because our planet had a rocky surface, liquid water, and a blanketing atmosphere. But life th...

Newly found species reveals how T. rex became king of dinosaurs

Mar 17, 2016 (SPX)

The remains of a new species of horse-sized dinosaur reveal how Tyrannosaurus rex became one of Earth's top predators, a study suggests. The discovery unearthed...

Microbial Mats Offer Clues To Life on Early Earth

Mar 16, 2016 (SPX)

Ancient clusters of rock that preserve some of the oldest microbes on Earth occasionally possess mysterious branch-like formations. Now, scientists think they k...

Paleontologists discover 250-million-year-old new species of reptile in Brazil

Mar 15, 2016 (SPX)

An international team of scientists, from three Brazilian universities and one UK university, have discovered a new fossil reptile that lived 250 million years ...

First microwhip scorpion from Mesozoic period found in Burmese amber

Mar 10, 2016 (SPX)

It's smaller than a grain of rice, yellowish, trapped in amber and lived 100 million years ago alongside dinosaurs. Meet Electrokoenenia yaksha, a newly describ...

Evolutionary leap from fins to legs was surprisingly simple

Mar 09, 2016 (SPX)

New research reveals that the limbs of the earliest four-legged vertebrates, dating back more than 360 million years ago, were no more structurally diverse than...

Scientists uncover ancient viruses from 30 million years ago

Mar 09, 2016 (SPX)

Researchers from Boston College, US, have revealed the global spread of an ancient group of retroviruses that affected about 28 of 50 modern mammals' ancestors ...

Climate change wiped out prehistoric 'sea dragon': study

Mar 08, 2016 (AFP)

Prehistoric global warming wiped out the ichthyosaur, a toothy, dolphin-like reptile that disappeared from Earth's oceans tens of millions of years before the l...

Without ancestral gene life on Earth might not have evolved beyond slime

Mar 07, 2016 (SPX)

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have identified a common ancestral gene that enabled the evolution of advanced life over a billion years ago. ...

Fossil of oldest known land-dweller identified

Mar 04, 2016 (SPX)

A fossil dating from 440 million years ago is not only the oldest example of a fossilised fungus, but is also the oldest fossil of any land-dwelling organism ye...

Fungus fossil is oldest known land organism

Mar 02, 2016 (UPI)

Researchers think a 440 million-year-old fungus, recently found in fossilized form, jump-started the process of rot and soil formation on Earth, paving the way ...

Extinct otter-like 'marine bear' might have had a bite like a saber-toothed cat

Mar 02, 2016 (SPX)

New research suggests that the feeding strategy of Kolponomos, an enigmatic shell-crushing marine predator that lived about 20 million years ago, was strangely ...

Fossil find reveals just how big carnivorous dinosaur may have grown

Mar 01, 2016 (SPX)

An unidentified fossilised bone in a museum has revealed the size of a fearsome abelisaur and may have solved a hundred-year old puzzle. Alessandro Chiarenza, a...