All posts tagged: discoveries

Surprise fossil discoveries push back the evolution of complex animals

Surprise fossil discoveries push back the evolution of complex animals

Published by skeptic

Artist’s reconstruction of the ancient ocean ecosystem preserved in the Jiangchuan biota Xiaodong Wang A huge and beautifully preserved suite of fossils discovered in China has cast doubt on the idea that complex life flourished dramatically during a rapid burst of evolution known as the Cambrian explosion. This event, spanning roughly 541 million to 513 million years ago, is when most of the animal groups alive today are thought to have first appeared, along with a bizarre array of evolutionary experiments that later went extinct. In the preceding period, known as the Ediacaran, it was thought that life was much less complex. But that is contradicted by the new fossil site in Yunnan province, known as the Jiangchuan biota, which includes more than 700 fossils dating from 554 to 537 million years ago. “The discovery shows that Cambrian-type animal communities did not appear suddenly, but already had clear foundations and transitional forms by the end of the Ediacaran,” says Gaorong Li at Yunnan University in Kunming, China, who led the team behind the discovery. Ross …

New discoveries in biomechanics by highly accurate digital twins

New discoveries in biomechanics by highly accurate digital twins

Published by skeptic

The dealii-X project aims to create highly accurate digital twins of human organs using advanced computational models, enhancing insights into biomechanics and improving medical understanding and treatment of diseases. The project “dealii-X: an Exascale Framework for Digital Twins of the Human Body” is one of the EuroHPC Centres of Excellence, aiming to develop a scalable, high-performance computational platform to create accurate digital twins of human organs. The project has a strong mathematical component and builds on the deal.II library,¹ a toolbox for enabling the rapid development of finite element models for the numerical approximation of the solution of partial differential equations. These models have traditionally been used to describe a wide variety of engineering problems, be it how heat spreads through a device, how a bridge bends under load, or how sound moves through the air, all of which are solved by representing the underlying laws of physics on a computer. The key idea is to break a complicated shape into many small, simple pieces (elements), approximate the solution within each piece, and then stitch …

Zombie fungus, ‘living stones’ among favorite botany discoveries of 2025

Zombie fungus, ‘living stones’ among favorite botany discoveries of 2025

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It’s easy to forget how much we still don’t know about our planet’s ecosystems. Every year, researchers identify thousands of plant and fungi species that were previously unknown to science. While it can be tough to highlight the most striking examples, an international team of scientists led by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) in London, have offered their personal picks for 2025. The selection of spider-infecting zombie parasites, stone-camouflaged plants, and a “fire demon flower” is certainly worth a closer look. In Brazil, botanists described Purpureocillium atlanticum for the first time. This deadly fungus targets the region’s trapdoor spiders that reside in burrows on the rainforest floor. Once infected, P. atlanticum kills the arachnid after covering almost its entire body in fine threads of white root-like structures called mycelium. The fungus then grows a nearly 0.8 inch fruiting body through the trapdoor burrow entry. This extension eventually releases its own spores into a world of unsuspected spiders. The entomopathogenic …

The best dinosaur discoveries of 2025

The best dinosaur discoveries of 2025

Published by skeptic

In 2025, dinosaurs were everywhere. In May, the BBC revived their landmark series Walking With Dinosaurs, while July saw the release of Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film in the extinction-proof Jurassic Park franchise. Rising auction prices for dinosaur skeletons were a rich source of media headlines and academic concern. And a record-breaking number of visitors (6.3 million in 2024–2025) flocked to the Natural History Museum in London, where dinosaurs are a key draw. A golden era in dinosaur science is driving this fascination with dinosaurs. Around 1,400 dinosaur species are now known from more than 90 countries, with the rate of discovery accelerating in the last two decades. The year 2025 has so far seen the discovery of 44 new dinosaur species – nearly one a week. Many new discoveries come from palaeontological hotspots, such as Argentina, China, Mongolia and the US, but dinosaur fossils are also being found in many other places, from a Serbian village to the rainswept coast of north-west Scotland. Even as a researcher, it is hard to keep track, …

The most amazing archaeology photos and discoveries of 2025

The most amazing archaeology photos and discoveries of 2025

Published by skeptic

The Denisovan skull Hebei GEO University In 2010, DNA analysis of a finger bone around 40,000 years old revealed that it came from a previously unknown group of ancient humans, dubbed the Denisovans after the cave in Siberia where the bone was found. But with no skulls, we had no idea what they looked like. Now, Denisovan DNA has been found in this 146,000-year-old skull found in China. It suggests these people had an unusual combination of features, with faces similar to ours, but with thick brow ridges. A woman and baby buried at an Anglo-Saxon cemetery in Scremby, UK Dr Hugh Willmott, University of Sheffield This picture is a sad one. You might miss it on a quick glance, but the woman buried here is cradling a young baby in her arms, and probably died in childbirth. She lived in the 5th or 6th century and was richly dressed when buried. The cemetery at Scremby, UK, was discovered by a metal detectorist in 2018 and excavated by archaeologists including Hugh Willmott at the University …

2025 was chock full of exciting discoveries in human evolution

2025 was chock full of exciting discoveries in human evolution

Published by skeptic

This year has brought many revelations about our ancient human relatives WHPics / Alamy This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and new ideas from the study of human evolution in 2025, we’d still be here in 2027. It has been a packed year and I don’t think it’s possible for one person to digest everything that happened, unless that person locked themselves in a room and paid no attention to anything else. That’s especially true in human evolution, because it’s a decentralised field: unlike particle physicists, who often team up en masse to do great big one-off experiments like those at the Large Hadron Collider, palaeoanthropologists are whizzing off in all directions at once. There are two ways this exercise in rounding up the year could go awry: I could bury you under a mountain of studies that you can’t dig your way out of, or …