All posts tagged: Prehistoric

An odd-nosed crocodile ate our prehistoric ancestors

An odd-nosed crocodile ate our prehistoric ancestors

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Humans have contended with crocodiles for a really long time. The recent discovery of an ancient crocodilian species sporting a strange snout indicates the reptiles may have even preyed on our earliest known hominin ancestor. The species detailed in a study published today in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology even likely went after anthropology’s most famous historical hominid—Australopithecus afarensis, better known as  Lucy.  Today’s crocodiles—and the danger they pose—remain virtually unchanged since they first evolved on Earth over 200 million years ago. The newly described species Crocodylus lucivenator existed 3.4 to 3 million years ago in present-day Ethiopia, and looked similar to the American crocodile (Crocodylus acutus). While largely arid today, the region during C. lucivenator’s era was covered with shrubs and wetlands broken up by multiple rivers. In 2016, researchers began to suspect the existence of a previously unknown croc species while examining archival remains from dozens of specimens at a museum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital city. …

Prehistoric ‘sea’ monster also lurked in rivers, data show

Prehistoric ‘sea’ monster also lurked in rivers, data show

Published by skeptic

Mosasaurs — a fearsome group of ancient predators — once ruled the seas. Now researchers have turned up a 66-million-year fossil tooth from one. And the big surprise: It came from a site that wasn’t part of the ocean. As such, this tooth is rewriting the aquatic reptile’s history. Some mosasaurs ruled the rivers, it suggests. The tooth came from a genus known as Prognathodontini (Prog-NAH-thow-don-TEE-nee). These enormous animals could span up to 11 meters (36 feet) — or about the length of a telephone pole. The lizard-like creatures showed up during the Late Cretaceous, some 100 million years ago. Then, like nearly all of their dinosaur cousins, mosasaurs went extinct when a massive asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago. Explainer: The age of dinosaurs Ancient dinos roamed the land. Mosasaurs prowled the water. More closely related to lizards and snakes than dinos, these giants had shark-like tails and paddle-shaped fins. These helped them glide through water to surprise their prey. With powerful jaws, this lurking predator “could bite through big turtles, fishes and …

Prehistoric Japan was home to cave lions—not tigers

Prehistoric Japan was home to cave lions—not tigers

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Present-day Japan may see its fair share of bears, but the islands’ big cat populations are long gone. Between 129,000 and 11,700 years ago, temporary land bridges allowed the ancient predators to migrate between mainland Asia and the islands. Paleobiologists have long believed tigers were the primary cats to make this trek, but recently analyzed evidence published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests a different timeline. “Our findings challenge the prevailing view that tigers once took refuge in Japan and that cave lion distribution was limited to the Russian Far East and northeast China,” explained the study’s authors. “These findings provide evidence that lions, rather than tigers, colonized the Japanese archipelago during the Late Pleistocene.” The earliest big cats got their start in Africa around 6.4 million years ago, but it would take another 5.4 million years for the first lions to travel into northern Eurasia. While their tiger cousins largely migrated toward Eurasia’s southern …

Study finds microbes used oxygen far earlier than scientists thought

Study finds microbes used oxygen far earlier than scientists thought

Published by Jenni Sidey

Oxygen fills the air today, but for most of Earth’s early history it barely existed. Scientists say the atmosphere did not hold steady oxygen until about 2.33 billion years ago, during the Great Oxidation Event, or GOE. That long wait has puzzled researchers for decades. Now geobiologists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say some microbes may have learned to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years earlier. The work comes from MIT’s Fatima Husain and Gregory Fournier, along with Haitao Shang and Stilianos Louca at the University of Oregon. Their study appears in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. The team tracked the origin of a crucial oxygen-using enzyme found across most oxygen-breathing life today. Their results point to the Mesoarchean era, between 3.2 and 2.8 billion years ago. That timing lands well before the GOE. A new twist on an old oxygen mystery The first big oxygen makers were cyanobacteria, microbes that use sunlight and water to make energy. Oxygen comes out as a byproduct. Scientists place the rise of cyanobacteria around 2.9 billion years ago, …

Hand discoverd in Indonesia is oldest known prehistoric cave painting

Hand discoverd in Indonesia is oldest known prehistoric cave painting

Published by Sam Flores

The ‘negative hand,’ dated to 67,800 years ago, visible beneath the calcite layer to the right above the brown shape. MAXIME AUBERT The karst caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi have proven to be a treasure trove of cave art. In just over a decade, they have overtaken the European “cathedrals” of prehistoric art, such as Altamira near Santander, Spain (15,000 years old), Lascaux in Dordogne (22,000 years old), Cosquer near Marseille (33,000 years old) or Chauvet in Ardèche (36,000 years old), the latter three of which are located in France. This is not due to the technical sophistication of their drawings, which are less advanced, but rather to their remarkable age. The latest discovery, described in scientific journal Nature on Wednesday, January 21, is a simple human hand, created using a stencil, its pale imprint faintly contrasting with the ochre outline formed by sprayed pigment. It is partially covered by darker, much more recent drawings of horse riders. Such “negative hands” were stenciled in caves and rock shelters around the world during prehistory, …

AI helps archaeologists build low-cost stone age video games in days

AI helps archaeologists build low-cost stone age video games in days

Published by Jenni Sidey

Museums have spent decades trying to make the distant past feel alive. Audiovisual shows, touch screens and digital displays have helped, but they are often expensive to develop and hard to update when new discoveries come in. That cost has kept many smaller museums and research groups on the sidelines, watching as big commercial studios shape how most people picture ancient history. Blockbuster game series such as Assassin’s Creed or Civilization have brought prehistoric and ancient worlds to millions of players. They are visually stunning, but they do not always treat accuracy as a top priority. For archaeologists who spend their lives working with fragile evidence, it can be frustrating to see the past turned into a backdrop rather than a carefully told story. A team at the University of Copenhagen decided to see whether that could change. In a new research paper, they show that with artificial intelligence, the free game engine Unreal and open tutorials on YouTube, it is now possible for beginners to build their own educational 3D game about the Stone …