ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

A new study provides insight into where chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) avoided climate instability during glacial and interglacial periods in Africa over the past 120,000 years.

Biologists establish the origin date of the earliest tetrapods and discover they acquired several of the major new adaptive traits that enabled vertebrate life on land at accelerated evolutionary rates.

Scientists have discovered that extensive chains of volcanoes have been responsible for both emitting and then removing atmospheric carbon dioxide over geological time. This stabilized temperatures at Earth's surface.

Ocean deoxygenation during the Mesozoic Era was much more rapid than previous thought, with CO2 induced environmental warming creating ocean 'dead zones' over timescales of only tens of thousands of years. The research paints a new picture of severe ocean deoxygenation events in our planet's geologic history.

A study found that as meltwater lakes on the surface of Greenland's ice sheet rapidly drain, they create water blisters between the ice and the bedrock that scientists could use to understand the hydrological network below Greenland's thick inland ice sheet. These networks could affect the stability of the ice sheet as Earth's climate warms.

If you've ever suffered from a sore jaw that popped or clicked when you chewed gum or crunched hard foods, you may be able to blame it on your extinct ancestors. That's according to a recent study of the chewing mechanics of an ancient human relative called Homo floresiensis, which inhabited the Indonesian island of Flores before our species arrived there some 50,000 years ago.

A group of scholars is denouncing what they call unsubstantiated and harmful claims of cannibalistic Caribs migrating to the Caribbean.

Researchers describe two new species of fossil ctenophores from the mid-Cambrian of Western USA, one of which has a preserved nervous system, which illuminates the early evolution of nervous and sensory features in ctenophores.

At certain sites in the Grand Canyon, more than one billion years' worth of rocks have gone missing from the geologic record. Scientists are trying to figure out why.