EARLY EARTH - DARWIN DAILY

Fossil shows earless seals living in Australia 3 million years ago

Apr 06, 2020 (UPI)

Scientists identified a 3-million-year-old tooth, found on a beach in the state of Victoria, as belonging to an ancient earless seal species. The tooth is only ...

Most of Earth's carbon was hidden in the core during its formative years

Apr 06, 2020 (SPX)

Now, a team of scientists reports March 30 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences how carbon behaved during Earth's violent formative pe...

Feathery find: One of the last dino raptors lived in New Mexico

Mar 26, 2020 (UPI)

Researchers recovered the 67-million-year-old remains from a cretaceous rock deposit in New Mexico's San Juan Basin. Though the fossil was originally discovered...

Ancestor of all animals identified in Australian fossils

Mar 25, 2020 (SPX)

The tiny, wormlike creature, named Ikaria wariootia, is the earliest bilaterian, or organism with a front and back, two symmetrical sides, and openings at eithe...

Half billion-year-old 'social network' observed in early animals

Mar 23, 2020 (SPX)

Scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford discovered the fossilised threads - some as long as four metres - connecting organisms known as rangeom...

When fish gave us the finger: this ancient four-limbed fish reveals the origins of the human hand

Mar 19, 2020 (SPX)

To complete this transition, several anatomical changes were necessary. One of the most important was the evolution of hands and feet. Working with researchers ...

Ancient fish fossil reveals evolutionary origin of the human hand

Mar 19, 2020 (SPX)

An international team of palaeontologists from Flinders University in Australia and Universite du Quebec a Rimouski in Canada have revealed the fish specimen, a...

Late Cretaceous dinosaur-dominated ecosystem

Mar 19, 2020 (SPX)

The western landmass (Laramidia) contained a relatively thin stretch of land running north-south, which was bordered by that inland sea to the east and the risi...

'Wonderchicken,' 66.7 million-year-old bird fossil, discovered

Mar 18, 2020 (UPI)

The fossil of Asteriornis maastrichtensis, from the Masozoic era, was discovered in a limestone rock formation near the French-Belgian border by a team led by U...

Earth's mantle, not its core, may have generated planet's Early magnetic field

Mar 17, 2020 (SPX)

In a study appearing March 15 in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Scripps Oceanography researchers Dave Stegman, Leah Ziegler, and Nicolas Blanc...

Water, carbon and nitrogen were not immediately supplied to Earth

Mar 13, 2020 (SPX)

The new findings, which are a result of collaboration among scientists from Germany, Denmark, Wales, Australia and Japan, will be published in Nature under the ...

Scotland's Isle of Sky hosted rich dinosaur diversity during middle Jurassic

Mar 12, 2020 (UPI)

Dinosaur remains from the Middle Jurassic Period are rare, but the new Scottish fossils sites -- described this week in the journal PLOS One -- suggests many di...

Ancient shell shows days were half-hour shorter 70 million years ago

Mar 10, 2020 (SPX)

The ancient mollusk, from an extinct and wildly diverse group known as rudist clams, grew fast, laying down daily growth rings. The new study used lasers to sam...

Ocean changes almost starved life of oxygen

Mar 04, 2020 (SPX)

Then, as now, the planet had an "oxidizing" atmosphere, driven by phytoplankton - the "plants" of the ocean - releasing oxygen during photosynthesis. However, n...

Geologists determine early Earth was a 'water world' by studying exposed ocean crust

Mar 04, 2020 (SPX)

And that could have major implications on the origin of life. "An early Earth without emergent continents may have resembled a 'water world,' providing an impor...

Early worm lost lower limbs for tube-dwelling lifestyle

Feb 28, 2020 (SPX)

Mystery has long surrounded the evolution of Facivermis, a worm-like creature that lived approximately 518 million years ago in the Cambrian period. It had a lo...

One billion-year-old green seaweed fossils unearthed in China

Feb 24, 2020 (UPI)

The 1-billion-year-old micro-fossils, tiny imprints left behind by the algae species Proterocladus antiquus, comprise the oldest evidence of green seaweeds yet ...

The Earth formed much faster than previously thought

Feb 21, 2020 (SPX)

On an astronomical scale, this is extremely fast, the researchers explain. If you compare the solar system's estimated 4.6 billion years of existence with a 24-...

Fossilized insect from 100 million years ago is oldest record of primitive bee with pollen

Feb 17, 2020 (SPX)

The female bee, which became stuck in tree resin and thus preserved in amber, has been identified by Oregon State University researcher George Poinar Jr. as a n...

How and when spines changed in mammalian evolution

Feb 04, 2020 (SPX)

By comparing the biomechanics of two modern animals, cat and lizard, and CT scans of synapsid fossils, the researchers overturned the traditional notion that th...