EARLY EARTH - INDO DAILY

How Mighty Jupiter Could Have Changed Earth's Habitability

Apr 11, 2014 (SPX)

Is Jupiter a friendly planet, Earth's enemy, or perhaps both? For decades, scientists have talked about how the giant gas planet keeps some asteroids from strik...

Ancient 'spider' images reveal eye-opening secrets

Apr 11, 2014 (SPX)

Stunning images of a 305-million-year-old harvestman fossil reveal ancestors of the modern-day arachnids had two sets of eyes rather than one. The researchers s...

Counting calories in the fossil record

Apr 08, 2014 (SPX)

The shells of clams, oysters, mussels and other "bivalve" organisms litter nearly every shoreline around the world today. Shells also strewed the beaches of anc...

Ancient whodunit may be solved: The microbes did it!

Apr 01, 2014 (SPX)

Evidence left at the crime scene is abundant and global: Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Eart...

The first insects were not yet able to smell well

Mar 31, 2014 (SPX)

An insect's sense of smell is vital to its survival. Only if it can trace even tiny amounts of odor molecules is it is able to find food sources, communicate wi...

Did microbes cause mass extinction?

Mar 31, 2014 (AFP)

Volcanoes and asteroids are sometimes blamed for wiping out nearly all life on Earth 252 million years ago, but US research Monday suggested a more small-time c...

Unique chromosomes preserved in Swedish fossil

Mar 27, 2014 (SPX)

Researchers from Lund University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History have made a unique discovery in a well-preserved fern that lived 180 million years ag...

Paleontologists announce discovery of Anzu wyliei

Mar 25, 2014 (SPX)

A team of researchers has announced the discovery of a bizarre, bird-like dinosaur, named Anzu wyliei, that provides paleontologists with their first good look ...

Earliest evidence of limb bone marrow in the fin of a 370-million-year-old fish

Mar 25, 2014 (SPX)

This week in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a team of French and Swedish researchers present the earliest fossil evidence for the presence of b...

A 'chicken from hell' dinosaur

Mar 25, 2014 (SPX)

Scientists from Carnegie and Smithsonian museums and the University of Utah unveiled the discovery this week, naming and description of a sharp-clawed, 500-poun...

Fossils of earliest stick insect to mimic plants discovered

Mar 25, 2014 (SPX)

An ancient stick insect species may have mimicked plant leaves for defense, according to a paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on March 19, 2014...

Amphibians and dinosaurs were the new large predators after the mass extinction

Mar 25, 2014 (SPX)

252 million years ago the largest extinction event occurred at the end of the Permian age. It wiped out almost 90 percent of all life in water. So far researche...

The first animals created a world hospitable to complex life forms

Mar 19, 2014 (SPX)

The first animals may have oxygenated the Earth's oceans - contrary to the traditional view that a rise in oxygen triggered their development, according to a st...

Parental care of the young from 450 million years ago

Mar 19, 2014 (SPX)

A portrait of prehistoric parenthood captured deep in the fossil record has been uncovered by an international team of scientists led by University of Leicester...

Simulating how the Earth kick-started metabolism

Mar 19, 2014 (SPX)

Researchers have developed a new approach to simulating the energetic processes that may have led to the emergence of cell metabolism on Earth - a crucial biolo...

Understanding how mountains and rivers make life possible

Mar 18, 2014 (SPX)

Favorable conditions for life on Earth are enabled in part by the natural shuttling of carbon dioxide from the planet's atmosphere to its rocky interior and bac...

Large mammals were the architects in prehistoric ecosystems

Mar 06, 2014 (SPX)

Researchers from Denmark demonstrate in a study that the large grazers and browsers of the past created a mosaic of varied landscapes consisting of closed and s...

Europe's largest terrestrial predator dinosaur found in Portugal

Mar 06, 2014 (SPX)

A new dinosaur species found in Portugal may be the largest land predator discovered in Europe, as well as one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jur...

Pigment or Bacteria? Researchers Re-examine the Idea of 'Color' in Fossil Feathers

Mar 06, 2014 (SPX)

Paleontologists studying fossilized feathers have proposed that the shapes of certain microscopic structures inside the feathers can tell us the color of ancien...

An ancient 'Great Leap Forward' for life in the open ocean

Mar 04, 2014 (SPX)

It has long been believed that the appearance of complex multicellular life towards the end of the Precambrian (the geologic interval lasting up until 541 milli...