Prehistoric

Modern Humans Began to Evolve, and Almost Immediately Split Into Three Groups

The Venus of Willendorf is a 4.4-inch Venus figurine, found in 1908 at a Palaeolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria.
In a new study published by the University of Vienna in collaboration with Vienna’s Natural History Museum, researchers applied high-resolution tomography, suggesting that the Venus originates from a region in northern Italy.

Tyrannosaurus rex may have been three species, scientists say

Located on the US/Canada border, and covering parts of Vermont, Quebec, and New York State, Lake Champlain has long been the reputed domain of a huge serpent known as Champ. Indeed, reports extend back more than 150 years. Certainly, one of the most fascinating developments in the story of Champ occurred in 1881. That was the year in which a huge skeleton was unearthed by one H.H. Burge. Of this sensational discovery, the May 27, 1881 issue of the Middlebury Register wrote: “The proprietors of the Champlain Granite Works, located near Barn Rock on Lake Champlain claim to have uncovered a petrified sea serpent of mammoth proportions, being about 8 inches in diameter and nearly fifty feet long. The surface of the stone bears evidence of the outer skin of a large serpent while the inner surface shows the entrails. The proprietors are intending soon to begin excavations along the place where it lies embedded in the dirt and granite, to ascertain its size.

A replica of one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered is unveiled at the American Museum of Natural History on January 14, 2016 in New York City. The replica of the “Titanosaur” weighs about 70 tons, is 17 feet tall and stretches to nearly 122 feet long. The dinosaur belongs to the titanosaur family and was discovered by Paleontologists in the Patagonian Desert of Argentina in 2014 and lived about 100 to 95 million years ago. The exhibit at the museum features bones, fossils and a fibreglass replica of the creature.

Neanderthal extinction not caused by brutal wipe out

A new study looked at a well-preserved fossil of an Ichthyornis that lived about 70 million years ago. The scientists compared the brain of the ancient bird to that of modern birds. Modern birds’ brains are structurally different, which might have allowed them to survive the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs

In Southwestern Germany, a team of researchers discovered teeth that were millions of years old and presumably belonged to an ancient Euro-Asian primate last September. Yet after the discovery was made public, controversy opened up about the interpretation of our earliest existence

Fossil of largest Jurassic pterosaur found on Skye

Several years ago, workers breaking ground for a power plant in New Zealand unearthed a record of a lost time: a 60-ton trunk from a kauri tree, the largest tree species in New Zealand. The tree, which grew 42,000 years ago, was preserved in a bog and its rings spanned 1700 years, capturing a tumultuous time when the world was turned upside down—at least magnetically speaking