Ninety-nine million years ago, a 55-foot dinosaur stalked the river deltas of North Africa. A sail on its back towered over the water as its crocodile-like jaws and curved claws made short work of car-size fish. This was Spinosaurus, discovered in 1915. Paleontologists have since debated how this creature lived. Did it prowl through currents in pursuit of prey, as recent research has suggested, or
The world’s oldest known all-purpose orifice sits in a fossil display case in the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, so close to the glass that enshrines it that you can “put your face up to it, like this,” said Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, holding his hand a couple inches from his nose. It belongs to a Psittacosaurus, a beaked, do
This composite made from images supplied by the researcher shows a platypus under visible light, left, and under ultraviolet light and yellow-filtered UV light.Credit...Jonathan Martin/Northland College When last we checked on the platypus, it was confounding our expectations of mammals with its webbed feet, duck-like bill and laying of eggs. More than that, it was producing venom. Now it turns ou
An artist’s concept of Planet Nine, a yet-unobserved object thought to orbit 20 billion miles from the sun. Some astronomers have suggested that it may be a black hole the size of a Ping-Pong ball.Credit...R. Hurt/Caltech/IPAC, via Reuters What is an astrophysicist to do during a pandemic, except maybe daydream about having a private black hole? Although it is probably wishful thinking, some astro
Robert Gore re-enacting how he discovered the versatile material known as Gore-Tex. His discovery involved stretching polytetrafluoroethylene, better known as Teflon.Credit...via W.L. Gore & Associates Inc. Robert Gore, a chemical engineer whose lab experiments with a polymer led unwittingly to the invention of Gore-Tex, the versatile, waterproof material used in ski jackets, aortic stent grafts a
Three 2,500-year-old Phoenician figurines recovered from the Mediterranean. The leftmost and center figurines carry a symbol associated with Tanit, a mother goddess of the Phoenician pantheon.Credit...Jonathan J. Gottlieb In 1972, in one of the early finds of marine archaeology, researchers discovered a trove of clay figurines on the seabed off the coast of Israel. The figurines — hundreds of them
A simulation of the black hole merger GW190521, which resulted in a chirp heard seven billion years later by the LIGO and Virgo antennas.Credit...N. Fischer, H. Pfeiffer, A. Buonanno/Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics; Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes Collaboration Well, that was some clash of the heavyweights. Astronomers reported on Wednesday that they had detected the loudest, most mas
An artist’s conception of Lystrosaurus in a state of torpor. Though its name means “shovel lizard,” it was more closely related to mammals.Credit...Crystal Shin How to tell if something that died 250 million years ago hibernated when it was alive? After all, hibernation — a state of reduced metabolism — is a good strategy for making it through long, harsh winters when food can be scarce. Biologist
An artist’s rendering of the Triassic Era aquatic reptile Tanystropheus. Its nine-foot neck contained only 13 vertebrae.Credit...Emma Finley-Jacob Nearly 250 million years ago, a very odd reptile patrolled the shorelines and coves of the Triassic Alps. Called Tanystropheus, it had a toothy head and a body echoing that of modern monitor lizards. But between them stretched a horizontal, giraffe-like
Mars is the darling of many planetary scientists, who continue to visit it through increasingly advanced robotic explorers. But don’t forget that our planetary neighbor is adorned with two moons: puny Phobos, a lumpy mass 17 miles across; and diminutive Deimos, just 9 miles long. Their names in ancient Greek may mean “fear” and “dread’, but the aesthetics of these Lilliputian space potatoes inspir
About 3,000 years ago, people on the eastern edge of Asia began sailing east, crossing thousands of miles of ocean to reach uninhabited islands. Their descendants, some 2,000 years later, invented the double-hulled canoe to travel even farther east, reaching places like Hawaii and Rapa Nui. Archaeologists and anthropologists have long debated: Just how far did the Polynesians’ canoes take them? Di
A 3D reconstruction of a giant larvacean and the complex structure of its inner filter. Video by Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and the Digital Life Projection/University of MassachusettsCreditCredit...Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute The bizarre life of the sea’s middle depths has long been a challenge to see, study and fathom. The creatures of that realm live under crushing pre
An artist’s illustration of what Spinosaurus, one of the largest predatory dinosaurs yet found, may have looked like. A large, powerful tail may have been used for swimming.Credit...Davide Bonadonna An enigmatic predatory dinosaur that lived in northern Africa about 95 million years ago possessed a long, powerful tail that may have propelled it through water, new fossils suggest. If true, this bea
An artist’s rendering of Cricosaurus suevicus, a Jurassic relative of modern crocodiles called thalattosuchians.Credit...Dmitry Bogdanov Some 400 million years ago, animals emerged from the ocean for the first time and began to thrive on land. But after eons of evolutionary experimentation, some lineages peaced out of the terrestrial world and embraced a full-time life at sea again. While whales a
Ice Age hunter-gatherers, foraging the bone-chilling, unforgiving steppes of what today is Russia, somehow completed a remarkable construction project: a 40-foot-wide, circular structure made from the skulls, skeletons and tusks of more than 60 woolly mammoths. The reason remains a mystery to archaeologists. “The sheer number of bones that our Paleolithic ancestors had sourced from somewhere and b
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