ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide meteorite crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice. The dating ends speculation that the meteorite impacted after the appearance of humans and opens up a new understanding of Earth's evolution in the post-dinosaur era.

The transition of human societies from hunter-gatherers to farmers and pastoralists is a more nuanced process than generally thought, according to a new study of peoples living in the highlands of southwest Ethiopia.

Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, mammoths 4,000 years ago, and the Christmas Island Rat 119 years ago. Since becoming a popular concept in the 1990s, de-extinction efforts have focused on grand animals with mythical stature, but now a team of paleogeneticists has turned their attention to Rattus macleari, and their findings provide insights into the limitations of de-extinction across all species.

Earth's thin crust softens considerably when it dives down into the Earth attached to a tectonic plate. That is demonstrated by X-ray studies carried out on a mineral which occurs in large quantities in basaltic crust. This softening can even cause the crust to peel away from the underlying plate. The delaminated crust has different physical properties from the rest of the mantle, which may explain anomalies in the speed with which seismic waves propagate through the mantle.

Researchers have examined what factors drive hair variation in a wild population of lemurs known as Indriidae. Specifically, the researchers aimed to assess the impacts of climate, body size and color vision on hair evolution.

Climate change can affect life on Earth. According to new research, it can also affect the dead. A study of exceptionally preserved fossils has found that rising global temperatures and a rapidly changing climate 183 million years ago may have created fossilization conditions in the world's oceans that helped preserve the soft and delicate bodies of deceased marine animals.