News tagged with million years

Earliest Animal Footprints Ever Found -- Discovered in Nevada

Oct 05, 2008 | 4.6 / 5 (30) | 6

The fossilized trail of an aquatic creature suggests that animals walked using legs at least 30 million years earlier than had been thought. The tracks -- two parallel rows of small dots, each about 2 millimeters ...

Study Pushes Appearance of Northern Hemisphere Ice Sheets Back By 22 Million Years

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Oct 02, 2008 | 4.3 / 5 (11) | 1

(PhysOrg.com) -- Climatologist Robert DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues at four institutions are reporting in the Oct. 2 issue of the journal Nature that their latest climate model of the Northern ...

Dinosaurs in the Triassic. Credit: Quercus Publishing, London.

Dinosaurs survived 2 mass extinctions and 50 million years before taking over the world and dominating ecosystems

Biology /

Sep 30, 2008 | 4.4 / 5 (22) | 1

Reporting in Biology Letters, Steve Brusatte, Professor Michael Benton, and colleagues at the University of Bristol show that dinosaurs did not proliferate immediately after they originated, but that their ...

100 million years AD

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Sep 26, 2008 | 2.8 / 5 (62) | 58

(PhysOrg.com) -- Jan Zalasiewicz, a lecturer in geology at the University of Leicester, has published a new study looking at the lasting impression made by mankind -100 million years hence. He takes the perspective of alien ...

Long-term study shows effect of climate change on animal diversity

Biology /

Sep 22, 2008 | 2.8 / 5 (4) | 0

Two species of giraffe, several rhinos and five elephant relatives, along with multitudes of rodents, bush pigs, horses, antelope and apes, once inhabited what is now northern Pakistan.

My, what big teeth you had! Extinct species had large teeth on roof of mouth

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

Sep 12, 2008 | 4.4 / 5 (5) | 0

When the world's land was congealed in one supercontinent 240 million years ago, Antarctica wasn't the forbiddingly icy place it is now. But paleontologists have found a previously unknown amphibious predator ...

Luck gave dinosaurs their edge

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

Sep 11, 2008 | 4.3 / 5 (12) | 0

By comparing early dinosaurs to their closest competitors, the curuotarsans, Steve Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History and colleagues have found that dinosaurs had no special ability to dominate ...

Scientists uncover miscalculation in geological undersea record

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Sep 10, 2008 | 4.5 / 5 (28) | 3

The precise timing of the origin of life on Earth and the changes in life during the past 4.5 billion years has been a subject of great controversy for the past century. The principal indicator of the amount of organic carbon ...

Researchers Find Oldest Gecko Fossil Ever Discovered

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

Aug 27, 2008 | 4.6 / 5 (8) | 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists from Oregon State University and the Natural History Museum in London have announced the discovery of the oldest known fossil of a gecko, with body parts that are forever preserved ...

Why is Greenland covered in ice?

Space & Earth / Earth Sciences

Aug 27, 2008 | 3.7 / 5 (63) | 14

There have been many reports in the media about the effects of global warming on the Greenland ice-sheet, but there is still great uncertainty as to why there is an ice-sheet there at all.

Long-term study shows effect of climate change on animal diversity

Space & Earth / Environment

Aug 19, 2008 | 3.4 / 5 (9) | 0

(PhysOrg.com) -- Two species of giraffe, several rhinos and five elephant relatives, along with multitudes of rodents, bush pigs, horses, antelope and apes, once inhabited what is now northern Pakistan. But ...

Pacific shellfish ready to invade Atlantic

Biology /

Aug 07, 2008 | 3.3 / 5 (3) | 0

As the Arctic Ocean warms this century, shellfish, snails and other animals from the Pacific Ocean will resume an invasion of the northern Atlantic that was interrupted by cooling conditions three million years ago, predict ...

Antarctic fossils paint a picture of a much warmer continent

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

Aug 04, 2008 | 4.6 / 5 (19) | 0

National Science Foundation-funded scientists working in an ice-free region of Antarctica have discovered the last traces of tundra--in the form of fossilized plants and insects--on the interior of the southernmost ...

Little teeth suggest big jump in primate timeline

Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils

Aug 04, 2008 | 4.2 / 5 (5) | 0

Tiny fossilized teeth excavated from an Indian open-pit coal mine could be the oldest Asian remains ever found of anthropoids, the primate lineage of today's monkeys, apes and humans, say researchers from Duke University ...