EARLY EARTH - INDO DAILY

Volcanic activity may have contributed to Cretaceous extinction

Oct 07, 2015 (SPX)

While there is general consensus that a massive asteroid colliding with Earth 66 million years ago contributed to the ensuing mass extinction, including that of...

Ancient alga left the water ready to survive on land

Oct 07, 2015 (SPX)

A team of scientists led by Dr Pierre-Marc Delaux (John Innes Centre / University of Wisconsin, Madison) has solved a long-running mystery about the first stage...

Are the blueprints for limbs encoded in the snake genome

Oct 07, 2015 (SPX)

Hundreds of millions of years ago, a common ancestor of mammals, birds, and reptiles evolved a phallus. We don't know much about phallus evolution (external gen...

New finds of a living fossil

Oct 07, 2015 (SPX)

The coelacanth fish, found today in the Indian Ocean, is often called a 'living fossil' because its last ancestors existed about 70 million years ago and it has...

Ancestors of land plants were wired to make the leap to shore

Oct 07, 2015 (SPX)

When the algal ancestor of modern land plants first succeeded in making the transition from aquatic environments to an inhospitable shore 450 million years ago,...

Dinosaur population study reveals how Maiasaura lived and died

Oct 07, 2015 (SPX)

Decades of research on Montana's state fossil - the "good mother lizard" Maiasaura peeblesorum - has resulted in the most detailed life history of any dinosaur ...

Montana student, professor discover earliest Jurassic corals

Oct 07, 2015 (SPX)

Five times in Earth's history mass extinction events have wiped out up to 90 percent of global life. University of Montana doctoral student Montana Hodges and g...

GSA Today study documents rare early Jurassic corals from North America

Oct 06, 2015 (SPX)

Mass extinction events punctuate the evolution of marine environments, and recovery biotas paved the way for major biotic changes. Understanding the responses o...

Prehistoric beavers paved the way for mammals in wake of dinos' departure

Oct 05, 2015 (UPI)

In millennia following the departure of the dinosaurs -- brought on by a combination of asteroids, earthquakes and massive lava flows -- one creature was able t...

Volcanoes, asteroid wiped out dinosaurs: study

Oct 01, 2015 (AFP)

A massive asteroid strike 66 million years ago triggered a string of potent volcanic eruptions that spelled doom for the dinosaurs, US researchers said Thursday...

Researchers ID pigment from fossils, revealing color of extinct animals

Oct 01, 2015 (SPX)

Scientists from Virginia Tech and the University of Bristol have revealed how pigment can be detected in mammal fossils, a discovery that may end the guesswork ...

Giant killer lizard fossil shines new light on early Australians

Sep 25, 2015 (SPX)

As if life wasn't hard enough during the last Ice Age, research led by the University of Queensland has found Australia's first human inhabitants had to contend...

Climate cooling and sea-level changes caused crocodilian retreat

Sep 25, 2015 (SPX)

Fluctuating sea levels and global cooling caused a significant decline in the number of crocodylian species over millions of years, according to new research. C...

Synthesizing how molecules formed at dawn of life on Earth

Sep 25, 2015 (SPX)

Researchers from the Institute for Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC), with support from the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Service of the Universitat Auto...

The Karoo Basin and the end Permian mass extinction

Sep 23, 2015 (SPX)

Earth's biosphere witnessed its greatest ecological catastrophe in the latest Permian, dated to about 251.9 million years ago. The current model for biodiversit...

Africa's earliest known coelacanth found in Eastern Cape

Sep 23, 2015 (SPX)

Various specimens of Africa's earliest coelacanth have been found in a 360 million year-old fossil estuary near Grahamstown, in South Africa's Eastern Cape. Mor...

New hadrosaur species discovered on Alaska's North Slope

Sep 23, 2015 (SPX)

Researchers working with specimens at the University of Alaska Museum of the North have described a new species of hadrosaur, a type of duck-billed dinosaur tha...

Pre-reptile may be earliest known to walk upright on all fours

Sep 18, 2015 (SPX)

A newly published analysis of the bones of Bunostegos akokanensis, a 260-million-year-old pre-reptile, finds that it likely stood upright on all-fours, like a c...

Unlocking secrets of how fossils form

Sep 17, 2015 (SPX)

Fossils tell amazing stories and inspire them, too - just think of this summer's "Jurassic World" blockbuster. But because some of the processes that preserve f...

Was Darwinius a little longer in the tooth than previously thought

Sep 15, 2015 (SPX)

A famous fossil of an early primate shares more in common with modern lemurs based on how its teeth erupted, according to new model developed at U of T Scarboro...