ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

A 19th century rural Dutch village had unusually low rates of breastfeeding, likely because mothers were busy working, according to a new study.

Researchers analyzed a fist-sized rock from Quebec, Canada, estimated to be between 3.75 and 4.28 billion years old. In an earlier article, the team found tiny filaments, knobs and tubes in the rock which appeared to have been made by bacteria. However, not all scientists agreed that these structures -- dating about 300 million years earlier than what is more commonly accepted as the first sign of ancient life -- were of biological origin. Now, after extensive further analysis of the rock, the team have discovered a much larger and more complex structure -- a stem with parallel branches on one side that is nearly a centimeter long -- as well as hundreds of distorted spheres, or ellipsoids, alongside the tubes and filaments. The researchers say that, while some of the structures could conceivably have been created through chance chemical reactions, the 'tree-like' stem with parallel branches was most likely biological in origin, as no structure created via chemistry alone has been found like it.

A study provides clear evidence for a link between astronomically-driven climate change and human evolution.

New research has examined data from the Critically Endangered Kenyan black rhino populations which suggest that individuals really matter when assessing the impact of poaching on species' survival chances.

Volcanoes can be found even off the coast of Antarctica. At the deep-sea volcano Orca, which has been inactive for a long time, a sequence of more than 85,000 earthquakes was registered in 2020, a swarm quake that reached proportions not previously observed for this region. The fact that such events can be studied and described in great detail even in such remote and therefore poorly instrumented areas is now shown by a new study. With the combined application of seismological, geodetic and remote sensing techniques, they were able to determine how the rapid transfer of magma from the Earth's mantle near the crust-mantle boundary to almost the surface led to the swarm quake.

Scientists have solved one of nature's biggest criminal cases, an egg forgery scandal two million years in the making. Their findings suggest that the victims of this fraud may now be gaining the upper hand.

A new study combining records of climate change during the last 3.5 million years with fossil evidence of mammals in Africa reveals that times of erratic climate change are not followed by major upheavals in evolution.

A new article thoroughly examines the evolutionary history and anatomical variation of archerfishes.

New research challenges the conventional theory that the transition from foraging to farming drove the development of complex, hierarchical societies by creating agricultural surplus in areas of fertile land.

A celestial event mentioned in an ancient Chinese text turns out to be the oldest known reference to a candidate aurora, predating the next oldest one by some three centuries, according to a recent study.