ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Plate tectonics may be unique to Earth and may be an essential characteristic of habitable planets. Estimates for its onset range from over 4 billion years ago to just 800 million years ago. A new study reports evidence of a transition in multiple locations around the world, 3.8-3.6 billion years ago, from stable 'protocrust' to pressures and processes that look a lot like modern subduction, suggesting a time when plates first got moving.

Human-related extinctions of the largest herbivores and carnivores are disrupting what appears to be a fundamental feature of past and present ecosystems, says a new study.

A new study asks: What are the unique chemical and geological processes at Aix-en-Provence that preserve spiders from the Oligocene Period so exquisitely?

The animal collections housed at zoos and natural history museums -- living specimens in the first case, preserved in the other -- constitute an exhaustive trove of information about Earth's biodiversity. A new paper lays out a pathway to increasing collaboration between these groups that would enhance our understanding of the animal kingdom.

Very few people in England ate large amounts of meat before the Vikings settled, and there is no evidence that elites ate more meat than other people, a major new bioarchaeological study suggests. Its sister study also argues that peasants occasionally hosted lavish meat feasts for their rulers. The findings overturn major assumptions about early medieval English history.

Crows and ravens have great flying ability, which allows them to gain access to new places more easily. While these skills were key to their success, new research also shows that big bodies and big brains played an important role in helping crows and ravens survive in the new climates they occupied.

The new analysis suggests that misinterpretation of archaeological evidence at certain sites in North and South America might be responsible for theories that humans arrived long before 13,000-14,200 years ago.

Stones that were incised with artistic designs around 15,000 years ago have patterns of heat damage which suggests they were carved close to the flickering light of a fire, a new study has found.

A unique confluence of archeology, molecular genetics and serendipity guided researchers to a deeper understanding of how modern corn was domesticated from teosinte, a perennial grass native to Mexico and Central America, more than 5,000 years ago.

Palaeontologists have discovered remarkable new evidence that pterosaurs, the flying relatives of dinosaurs, were able to control the color of their feathers using melanin pigments.

Although invisible to us, every teaspoon of seawater contains more than a million marine bacteria. These tiny microbes play pivotal roles in governing the chemical cycles that control our climate and shape the health of the global ocean, but are they passive drifters or purposeful hunters?

Can iron-rich dust fertilize the ocean, stimulate algae growth there, and thereby capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere? An international research team used deep-sea sediment cores from the Scotia Sea to investigate whether this hypothetical greenhouse gas sink had an effect during ice ages. Although dust input was high during ice ages, no evidence of a fertilization effect could be found in the Antarctic Ocean. Rather, the production of algae, for example, and thus carbon dioxide sequestration, was high only during warm periods when dust input was low.