EARLY EARTH - INDO DAILY

Big dinosaur discoveries in tiny toothy packages

Aug 13, 2015 (SPX)

Researchers have examined one of the smallest parts of the fossil record--theropod teeth--to shed light on the evolution of dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceo...

Carnivourous dinosaurs strolled around in Germany

Aug 13, 2015 (SPX)

142 million years ago two carnivorous dinosaurs strolled along the beach in what is now Germany. Their footprints fossilized and have been analyzed by a biologi...

Research shows catastrophic invertebrate extinction in Hawai'i and globally

Aug 13, 2015 (SPX)

Hawai'i has been called the "extinction capital of the world." But, with the exception of the islands' birds, there has until now been no accurate assessment of...

Bringing Danube's 'living fossils' back from brink of extinction

Aug 11, 2015 (AFP)

Europe's last wild sturgeons got a rare boost this summer when the conservationist group WWF Bulgaria released more than 50,000 babies of these prehistoric fish...

Ancient flood volcanoes could have altered climate

Aug 10, 2015 (SPX)

In June, 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded, blasting millions of tons of ash and gas over 20 miles high - deep into the stratosphere, a stable la...

Piecing together the Pangea puzzle

Aug 01, 2015 (SPX)

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, all the major continents were joined together, forming a continent called Pangea (which means "all land" in Greek). The...

First measurements taken of South Africa's Iron Age magnetic field history

Jul 30, 2015 (SPX)

A team of researchers has for the first time recovered a magnetic field record from ancient minerals for Iron Age southern Africa (between 1000 and 1500 AD). Th...

Computer model may explain how simple molecules became life

Jul 30, 2015 (SPX)

Nearly four billion years ago, the earliest precursors of life on Earth emerged. First small, simple molecules, or monomers, banded together to form larger, mor...

Research with bite

Jul 30, 2015 (SPX)

The Tyrannosaurus rex and its fellow theropod dinosaurs that rampage across the screen in movies like Jurassic World were successful predators partly due to a u...

Four-legged fossil suggests snakes evolved from burrowing ancestors

Jul 28, 2015 (SPX)

The discovery of a four-legged fossil of a snake hints that this suborder may have evolved from burrowing, rather than marine, ancestors. The unique four-legged...

Small oxygen jump helped enable early animals take first breaths

Jul 28, 2015 (SPX)

If oxygen was a driver of the early evolution of animals, only a slight bump in oxygen levels facilitated it, according to a multi-institutional research team t...

What killed off the megafauna

Jul 28, 2015 (SPX)

Rapid phases of warming climate played a greater role in the extinction of megafauna in the Late Pleistocene than did human activity, a new study shows. The stu...

Bleach a possible key to life on earth

Jul 24, 2015 (SPX)

Hydrogen peroxide - commonly used as hair bleach - may have provided the energy source for the development of life on Earth, two applied mathematicians have fou...

Fossil fuel emissions will complicate radiocarbon dating

Jul 21, 2015 (SPX)

Fossil fuel emissions could soon make it impossible for radiocarbon dating to distinguish new materials from artefacts that are hundreds of years old. Carbon re...

With teeth like that, this pre-dinosaur vegetarian was no push over

Jul 16, 2015 (SPX)

Discovered four years ago, and following an updated and more in-depth study of the herbivorous mammalian ancestor, Tiarajudens eccentricus, researchers from Bra...

105 million years ago, flies were doing the pollinating

Jul 10, 2015 (UPI)

The Cretaceous Period featured neither bees nor butterflies. So were ancient plants pollinated? It turns out flies did all the work. In a new study, published i...

New horned dinosaur reveals evolution of nose horn in Triceratops family

Jul 09, 2015 (SPX)

Scientists have discovered a striking new species of horned dinosaur (ceratopsian) based on fossils collected from a bone bed in southern Alberta, Canada. Wendi...

Mini sponge fossil disrupts timing of early evolution

Jul 08, 2015 (UPI)

An ancient sponge, no bigger than a grain of sand, is forcing scientists to rethink their explanation of early animal evolution. The tiny sponge, which measures...

Newly discovered 48-million-year-old lizard walked on water in Wyoming

Jul 07, 2015 (SPX)

A newly-discovered, 48-million-year-old fossil, known as a "Jesus lizard" for its ability to walk on water, may provide insight into how climate change may affe...

Mitochondria, plastids evolved together into single-cell plankton 'eye'

Jul 05, 2015 (SPX)

Scientists have peered into the eye-like structure of single-celled marine plankton called warnowiids and found it contains many of the components of a complex ...