ScienceDaily: Fossils & Ruins News

While much of public attention on Yellowstone focuses on its potential to produce large supereruptions, the hazards that are much more likely to occur are smaller, violent hydrothermal explosions. Hydrothermal explosions occur when near-boiling water suddenly flashes into steam, releasing large amounts of energy. The energy release fractures the rock downward, often leaving behind a crater. The same sources that can produce these explosions are what give Yellowstone its well-known hot springs, geysers, and fumaroles.

A hotter ocean is a hungrier ocean -- at least as far as fish predators are concerned. Scientists have discovered predator impacts in the Atlantic and Pacific peak at higher temperatures. The effects cascade down to transform other life in the ocean, potentially disrupting balances that have existed for millennia.

A new study combining archaeological, historical and bioarchaeological data provides new insights into the early Islamic period in modern-day Syria. The research team was planning to focus on a much older time period but came across what they believe to be remains of early Muslims in the Syrian countryside.

Researchers now reveal that nature's storage solution first evolved in ancient microbes living on Earth between one and two billion years ago.

The Wallacean islands of present-day Eastern Indonesia have a long history of occupation by modern humans. Notably, the maritime expansion of Austronesian speakers into Wallacea left archaeological traces of a Neolithic lifestyle and a genetic imprint still detectable in Eastern Indonesians today. To gain further insights into Wallacea's settlement history, scientists sequenced and analyzed sixteen ancient genomes from different islands of Wallacea, finding evidence for repeated genetic admixtures starting at least 3,000 years ago.

A tortoise from a Galápagos species long believed extinct has been found alive. Fernanda, named after her Fernandina Island home, is the first of her species identified in more than a century. Geneticist successfully extracted DNA from a specimen collected from the same island more than a century ago and confirmed that Fernanda and the museum specimen are members of the same species and genetically distinct from all other Galápagos tortoises.

New evidence suggests that two major glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) are losing ice at the fastest rate for at least 5,500 years.

The Colorado River is in an extremely severe drought and has been for the last 22 years. To better understand this drought, researchers looked at the drought history within the Colorado River Basin. Previous studies have gone back 1,200 years, but this paper goes back 2,000 years. The findings, using paleo hydrology, show that there was an even more severe drought in the Colorado River Basin in the second century.

Palaeontologists have identified the remains of one of Europe's largest ever land-based hunters: a dinosaur that measured over 10m long and lived around 125 million years ago.

The fossil of a still-unnamed species provides the first known record of the abelisaurid group of theropods from a middle Cretaceous-aged (approximately 98 million years old) rock unit known as the Bahariya Formation, which is exposed in the Bahariya Oasis of the Western Desert of Egypt.

Using radio transmitters, scientists have gained new insights into the behavior of medium ground finches in the Galapagos Islands. A study reveals daily movement patterns covering an area equivalent to the size of 30 soccer fields.

New models that show how the continents were assembled are providing fresh insights into the history of the Earth and will help provide a better understanding of natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes.