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30+ min ago   (332+ words) Saber-toothed cats may have suffered from serious health problems as their populations declined before extinction, new research suggests. Scientists found signs of rare spinal tumours and several bone abnormalities in fossils of Smilodon fatalis from California’s La Brea Tar Pits....

1+ hour, 45+ min ago   (332+ words) Saber-toothed cats may have suffered from serious health problems as their populations declined before extinction, new research suggests. Scientists found signs of rare spinal tumours and several bone abnormalities in fossils of Smilodon fatalis from California’s La Brea Tar Pits....

2+ hour, 41+ min ago   (743+ words) An MP has called on ministers to change export controls so that significant fossils can be classed as national treasures after one of the UK’s best collections, unearthed on Dorset beaches, was sold overseas. Last week, a Guardian investigation revealed…...

10+ hour, 16+ min ago   (1610+ words) Using all publicly available and some new short-read datasets for A. montana and related species, which differ in size, original project and physical source material, we seek to answer three questions: How does the PlastidPipeline facilitate the production and analysis of…...

4+ hour, 18+ min ago   (448+ words) Scientists have discovered a new extinct amphibian species hiding in the fossil collections of Los Angeles’ La Brea Tar Pits. Named Spea labreae, the Ice Age spadefoot toad is an exceptionally rare find—only one other extinct Pleistocene amphibian has…...

2+ day, 14+ hour ago   (500+ words) A particle accelerator probed the proboscis of an extinct planthopper that lived 99 million years ago and may have drunk straight from trees About 99 million years ago, a planthopper died on a tree in what is today Myanmar. This insect was…...

4+ hour, 42+ min ago   (453+ words) A 244-million-year-old fossil from China provides the earliest evidence of an archosauromorph highly adapted to life in water The study was led by Li Chun, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of…...

6+ hour, 5+ min ago   (297+ words) Scientists a 66-million-year-old dinosaur bone have identified preserved molecules of collagen, the main protein in bone tissue. The unusual discovery is prompting scientists to reconsider the view that all organic molecules inevitably disappear during fossilization. The study results Analytical Chemistry…...

6+ hour, 35+ min ago   (715+ words) New research suggests crocodiles descended from warm-blooded, active archosaurs rather than cold-blooded ancestors. Fossil evidence from 81 species indicates both crocodile and dinosaur-bird lineages had high metabolic rates before crocodiles evolved cold-blooded metabolisms around 66 million years ago Adelaide: The closest living…...

7+ hour, 12+ min ago   (670+ words) Even if crocodiles somehow had wings, the metabolic difference in power alone would mean they could never fly | Image: Pexels The closest living relatives of crocodiles and alligators are, perhaps surprisingly, birds. They are both archosauriforms, a group of species…...