ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Humans have known for over two thousand years that shipworms, a worm-like mollusk, are responsible for damage to wooden boats, docks, dikes and piers. Yet new research reveals that we still don't know the most basic thing about them: how they eat.

Museum specimens held in natural history collections around the world represent a wealth of underutilized genetic information due to the poor state of preservation of the DNA, which often makes it difficult to sequence. An international team has optimized a method developed for analyzing ancient DNA to identify the relationships between species on a deep evolutionary scale.

New research suggests that the demographic collapse at the core of the Easter Island myth didn't really happen.