ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

Early animals formed complex ecological communities more than 550 million years ago, setting the evolutionary stage for the Cambrian explosion, according to a new study.

A research team has investigated a meteorite from Mars using neutron and X-ray tomography. The technology, which will probably be used when NASA examines samples from the Red Planet in 2030, showed that the meteorite had limited exposure to water, thus making life at that specific time and place unlikely.

Organisms adjust their cell walls according to environmental conditions such as temperature. Some adaptations involve changes in lipids which may still be preserved long after the rest of the organisms has been degraded. Researchers have studied a specific group of lipids called long chain diols which are found in sea sediments all over the world, and which can be preserved for millions of years.

Despite the rapid melting of ice in many parts of Antarctica during the second half of the 20th century, researchers have found that the floating ice shelves which skirt the eastern Antarctic Peninsula have undergone sustained advance over the past 20 years.

Researchers have examined the mass extinction of large animals over the past tens of thousands of years and found that extinct species had, on average, much smaller brains than species that survived.