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Categories: Chemistry: General, Paleontology: Fossils

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Ice Age saber-tooth cats and dire wolves experienced a high incidence of bone disease in their joints, according to new research.

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Humans began altering environments long before records were kept of the things that lived in them, making it difficult for scientists to determine what healthy ecosystems should look like. Researchers show the recent fossil record preserves a reliable snapshot of marine environments as they existed before humans.

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Movement in the Earth's tectonic plates indirectly triggers bursts of biodiversity in 36 million-year cycles by forcing sea levels to rise and fall, new research has shown.

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Researchers describe a 500 million-year-old tunicate fossil species. The study suggests that the modern tunicate body plan was already established soon after the Cambrian Explosion.

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Birds are the only group of dinosaurs that survived the asteroid-induced mass extinction 66 million years ago. But not all the birds alive at the time made it. Why the ancestors of modern birds lived while so many of their relatives died has been a mystery that paleontologists have been trying to solve for decades. Two new studies point to one possible factor: the differences between how modern birds and their ancient cousins molt their feathers.

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Scientists have filled a major gap in the state's fossil record -- describing the first known Jurassic vertebrate fossils in Texas. The weathered bone fragments are from the limbs and backbone of a plesiosaur, an extinct marine reptile.

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Scientists have been mystified as to why animals are missing in much of the fossil record. Researchers have now developed a new method to determine if animals really were absent during certain geological eras, or if they were present but too fragile to be preserved.

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A Cretaceous origin for placental mammals, the group that includes humans, dogs and bats, has been revealed by in-depth analysis of the fossil record, showing they co-existed with dinosaurs for a short time before the dinosaurs went extinct.

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50 million years ago in what is now northwestern Colorado, a katydid died, sank to the bottom of a lake and was quickly buried in fine sediments, where it remained until its compressed fossil was recovered in recent years. When researchers examined the fossil under a microscope, they saw that not only had many of the insect's hard structures been preserved in the compressed shale, so had several internal organs and tissues, which are not normally fossilized.

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A water purification system separates out salt and other unnecessary particles with an electrified version of dialysis. Successfully applied to wastewater with planned expansion into rivers and seas, the method saves money and saps 90% less energy than its counterparts.

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Scientists detect a new carbon compound in space for the first time. Known as methyl cation (pronounced cat-eye-on) (CH3+), the molecule is important because it aids the formation of more complex carbon-based molecules. Methyl cation was detected in a young star system, with a protoplanetary disk, known as d203-506, which is located about 1,350 light-years away in the Orion Nebula.

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How the megalodon, a shark that went extinct 3.6 million years ago, stayed warm was a matter of speculation among scientists. Using an analysis of tooth fossils from the megalodon and other sharks of the same period, a study suggests the animal was able to maintain a body temperature well above the temperature of the water in which it lived. The finding could help explain why the megalodon went extinct during the Pliocene Epoch.

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CoSn(OH)6 (CSO) is an effective oxygen evolution reaction (OER) catalyst, necessary for developing next-generation lithium -- air batteries. However, current methods of synthesizing CSO are complicated and slow. Recently, an international research team synthesized CSO in a single step within 20 minutes using solution plasma to generate CSO nanocrystals with excellent OER catalytic properties. Their findings could boost the manufacturing of high energy density batteries.

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Researchers have identified the oldest decisive evidence of humans' close evolutionary relatives butchering and likely eating one another.

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The Bachman's warbler, a songbird that was last seen in North America nearly 40 years ago, was a distinct species and not a hybrid of its two living sister species, according a new study in which the full genomes of seven museum specimens of the bird were sequenced.

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The El Gigante rockshelter in western Honduras is among only a handful of archaeological sites in the Americas that contain well-preserved botanical remains spanning the last 11,000 years. Considered one of the most important archaeological sites discovered in Central America in the last 40 years, El Gigante was recently nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

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According to a new study, eukaryotes -- complex life forms with nuclei in their cells, including all the world's plants, animals, insects and fungi -- trace their roots to a common Asgard archaean ancestor. That means eukaryotes are, in the parlance of evolutionary biologists, a 'well-nested clade' within Asgard archaea, similar to how birds are one of several groups within a larger group called dinosaurs, sharing a common ancestor.

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Chemists discovered a new way to make polymers stronger: introduce a few weaker bonds into the material. Working with polyacrylate elastomers, they could increase the materials' resistance to tearing up to tenfold by using a weaker type of crosslinker to join some of the polymer building blocks.

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To unveil the previously elusive behavior and stability of complex metal compounds found in aqueous solutions called 'POMs', researchers have created a speciation atlas. This achievement has the potential to drive new discoveries and advancements in fields like catalysis, medicine, and beyond.

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Fifteen years of archaeological work in the Tam Pa Ling cave in northeastern Laos has yielded a reliable chronology of early human occupation of the site. The team's excavations through the layers of sediments and bones that gradually washed into the cave and were left untouched for tens of thousands of years reveals that humans lived in the area for at least 70,000 years -- and likely even longer.