Science

About 66 million years ago (the end of the Cretaceous period), a 10-km-wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The impact unleashed an incredible amount of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that led …

Trilobites had well-developed gill-like structures in their upper leg branches, according to a new imaging study led by the University of California, Riverside. Trilobite fossil preserved in pyrite. Image credit: Jin-Bo Hou / University of California, Riverside. Trilobites are extinct marine arthropods that dominated the ecosystems of the Paleozoic era. …

Fossiomanus sinensis and Jueconodon cheni, two distantly related species of mammaliamorphs that lived some 120 million years ago (Early Cretaceous epoch), were well adapted for fossorial (burrowing) life, and are the first ‘scratch-diggers’ known from the Jehol Biota, which is distributed mainly in western Liaoning Province and neighboring areas in …

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the Yukon Territory, Canada, survived the extinction at the end of the last Ice Age by adapting their diet over thousands of years — from a primary reliance on horses (Equus sp.) during the Pleistocene, to moose (Alces alces) and caribou (Rangifer tarandus) today. Gray …

Opposed thumbs are adaptations to arboreal life and rare for non-mammal vertebrates; Kunpengopterus antipollicatus, a newly-discovered species of arboreal pterosaur that inhabited a unique forest ecosystem in what is now China during the Jurassic period, shows the oldest record of such a feature. Life reconstruction of Kunpengopterus antipollicatus in the …

  Scientists working at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois have made some of the most important discoveries in physics over the years, including the existence of the top quark and characterizing the neutrino. Now, the team working on Fermilab’s Muon g−2 experiment has reported a tantalizing hint of a new type …

    (Credit: Robin Dienel/Carnegie Institution for Science)We are constantly learning new things about the universe, but the more we know, the clearer it becomes that we’re missing pieces of the puzzle. The possible existence of dark matter is one of the more vexing missing pieces, but a team from …

  Mars is shaking, and we’d never know were it not for the trailblazing InSight lander. This mission touched down on the red planet in 2018, making history by deploying the first and only seismometer on another planet. NASA has been listening for rumbles ever since, and it just heard …

  Humanity has come a long way in understanding the universe. We’ve got a physical framework that mostly matches our observations, and new technologies have allowed us to analyze the Big Bang and take photos of black holes. But the hypothetical EmDrive rocket engine threatened to upend what we knew …

The two subspecies of the South Asian river dolphin (Platanista gangetica) — the Indus river dolphin (Platanista gangetica minor) and the Ganges river dolphin (Platanista gangetica gangetica) — should each be recognized as distinct full species, according to a new study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. The Indus …