Every black-and-white photograph of the layers of our planet's tectonic history is an act of time travel - it gets us closer to understanding the past and the future of Earth. The photos are proof that the world is ever changing, showing how vast plains of sedimentary materials shift and morph over thousands of centuries.
Fossils are remarkable for their ability to viscerally connect us with long-lost life. The bulk of a Tyrannosaurus rex skull, the biting point of a shark tooth, the startling familiarity of a hominin footprintand then there's the charm inherent to any sample of regurgitalite, the paleontological term for fossilized vomit. Okay, charm might be a stretch, but to the right scientist, the rare finds are little treasures, says Arnaud Rebillard, a Ph.D. candidate in paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Berlin.
There's a principle I follow in user experience and design: learn from everything. Not just case studies or products, and not only from someone with a big brain and more zeros in their salary talking about increasing a metric. Lessons can be drawn from art, from fiction, from aviation - the sources are limitless. And today, a lesson from dinosaurs. Yep. While the world is going crazy doomscrolling through the Epstein files, I think we all need to chill and read about dinosaurs.
Even in England, where the recent developments of paleontological botany have opened up new lines of research among the plants of the coal measures, the zeal of the followers of Scott and F. W. Oliver has led to the commercial exploitation of a coal mine in Lancashire where fine specimens of Lyginodendron, the Cycadofilicales, and the fossil seeds of the earlier tree ferns are to be found in abundance.
Dinosaur fever gripped the Western world during the early 1900s, fueled by the discovery of new, ever larger and more spectacular dinosaurs in Europe and especially in North America. Interest in these fossils was not merely driven by academic curiosity. Dinosaur skeletons and research had become a status symbol for museums and their financiers, whether government or private, and colonial powers turned to their areas of influence to find new remains.
Thousands of years ago in what is now the Dominican Republic, there was a cave full of bones. And those bones were full of bees. In a paleontological first, researchers have discovered that bees used the jawbones of now extinct mammals as burrows. It's not clear what species of bee was exploiting this grisly opportunityonly their smooth-walled nests were left behind, nestled in the tooth pockets of ancient rodents and sloths.
A young group of teens stood on top of a rocky ledge, some fearful, some excited, some just egging their friends to jump. Their trepidations were warranted - it's not every day you're faced with a drop of about 30 feet above the surface of a pool of water. But inevitably, each brave adolescent took the leap and gasped for a few seconds of unnerving airtime before gravity plunged them into the cool freshwater below.
A high-resolution 'Google Maps' for Roman roads includes nearly 300,000 kilometres of viae Romanae. It brings together fragmented data sets to show the full glory of the network that connected the empire around AD 150, when it was at its biggest. But "although the roads are one of the best-known aspects of Roman history, it's surprising how many details about them we still don't know," says historian Catherine Fletcher.
A skeleton discovered on Dorset's Jurassic coast has been identified as a new species of prehistoric marine reptile that once ruled the oceans. The dolphin-sized ichthyosaur, called Xiphodracon goldencapensis or the Sword Dragon of Dorset, is the only known example of its kind in existence. Thousands of ichthyosaur fossils have been found along the Jurassic Coast, but scientists say this particular fossil helps to fill an evolutionary gap.
Mark Norell, whose discoveries helped to demonstrate that birds are living dinosaurs, has died aged 68. As a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, Norell combined fieldwork, cutting-edge analysis and a gift for collaboration, transforming how scientists and the public see dinosaurs. Norell and his colleagues showed that birds belong to the group of carnivorous dinosaurs known as theropods, which also include Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
In a corner of the sprawling grounds of Niamey's only museum a unique, open-air style arrangement in Niger's capital that doubles as a zoo imposing fossil replicas of long-extinct animals stand in a corrugated iron stall. On a recent late Friday afternoon, the Boubou Hama National Museum was busy with scores of excited children. They shrilled, delighted by the rubbery grunts of the hippos near the replicas, and the faint roars of the lions further up.
In this new study, the Human Paleontology Institute team, led by archaeologist Christophe Falguères, used a remarkably simple technique to offer a more concise time frame for the Petralona skull. Using calcite samples directly from the skull itself and from the deposits surrounding it, the researchers used a technique known as uranium-series dating that measures the decay rate of uranium isotopes as they morph into thorium over time.
Matt Lamanna, a dinosaur paleontologist, points out that the T-Rex’s portrayal in the original Jurassic Park film, where it cannot see stationary objects, misrepresents its visual acuity, which was likely superior compared to many dinosaurs.
