A new species of large-sized penguin being named Kairuku waewaeroa has been identified from the fossilized bones found in Kawhia Harbour on the North Island of New Zealand. Life reconstruction of giant penguins. Image credit: Simone Giovanardi. Kairuku waewaeroa roamed Earth during the Oligocene epoch, between 27 and 35 million …
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Paleontologists in China have identified a new species of pengornithid enantiornithine bird with a pair of elaborate tail feathers. An illustration showing what Yuanchuavis kompsosoura might have looked like in life. Image credit: Haozhen Zhang. Enantiornithes are the most successful group of Mesozoic birds, arguably representing the first global avian …
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Entomologists have described a new species in the window fly genus Scenopinus from Finland. Frontal view of male Scenopinus jerei. Image credit: Pohjoismäki & Haarto, doi: 10.3897/zookeys.1059.70085. Window flies are members of Scenopinidae, a small family of primitive flies belonging to the superfamily Asiloidea. They have a cosmopolitan distribution, with …
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Some unexplained results from the XENON1T dark-matter detector — a 1,300-kg vat of super-pure liquid xenon shielded from cosmic rays in a cryostat submerged in water deep 1.5 km beneath the Gran Sasso mountains of Italy — may have been caused by dark energy particles produced in a region of …
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Who doesn’t love gigantic, ancient volcanoes? Mars has a ton of volcanoes that come in sizes from huge to ridiculous. Today we learn that NASA scientists have uncovered evidence of explosive supervolcanoes in Arabia Terra, a battered upland region that we think is one of the oldest terrains on the …
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About 66 million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The impact eradicated roughly 75% of the animal and plant species on Earth, including whole groups like non-avian dinosaurs and ammonites. New research from the …
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When two substances are brought together, they will eventually settle into a steady state called the thermodynamic equilibrium. In new research, a team of physicists at Aalto University wanted to disrupt this state to see what happens; they subjected combinations of oils with different dielectric constants and conductivities to an …
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Paleontologists have described a new species of kiwi that lived during the mid-Pleistocene period on the North Island of New Zealand. The little spotted kiwi (Apteryx owenii). Artwork by John Gerrard Keulemans, 1870s. “Kiwi are an enigmatic and threatened group of birds, unique to New Zealand, with six living species …
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Paleontologists have described in detail for the first time the scaly skin of Carnotaurus sastrei, an abelisaurid theropod that lived in South America during the Late Cretaceous epoch, sometime between 72 and 70 million years ago. An artist’s reconstruction of Carnotaurus sastrei based on the scaly skin described by Hendrickx …
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Tardigrades utilize a tetrapod-like stepping pattern remarkably similar to that observed in insects, despite significant disparities in size and skeletal structure between the two groups, according to new research led by scientists from Rockefeller and Princeton Universities. Hypsibius exemplaris. Image credit: Tarushika Vasanthan & Jonathon Stone, doi: 10.22120/jwb.2020.96855.1037. The vast …
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