Oldest eyes like modern eyes, claim scientists in reports in ScienceDaily 6 December 2017, BBC News 7 December 2017 and PNAS doi:10.1073/pnas.1716824114, published online 4 December 2017. A group of scientists from Scotland, Germany and Estonia have studied the eyes of a trilobite fossil Schmidtiellus reetae found in Estonia rocks dated as 530 million years […]
Giant spider story shrinks, as reported in BBC News, 15 Feb 2005. A fossil discovered in 1980 in Argentina was claimed to be “the most terrifying spider ever to roam the Earth” and was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s largest spider, has been rediscovered after it had been locked in […]
Galactic guidance for dung beetles described in articles in BBC News, ScienceDaily, ScienceNOW, 24 January and Current Biology 2013; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.034. When dung beetles find a pile of droppings they gather some, shape it into a ball, and then quickly roll it far away ‘in a straight line’ to prevent others stealing it before they […]
Dino fleas are flies, according to reports in ABC News in Science and PhysOrg 21 February 2013, and Nature doi:10.1038/nature11898 20 February 2013. Palaeontologists have changed their minds about some fossil insects originally identified as giant fleas that infested feathered dinosaurs. The original belief they were fleas was because they had pincer-like hind legs that […]
Amber midges not primitive, according to ScienceDaily 5 October 2016 and Scientific Reports, 2016; 6: 34352 DOI: 10.1038/srep34352. Frauke Stebner and colleagues from Universities of Bonn, Kassel, (Gdańsk, Poland) and Lucknow (India) have found a previously unknown species of midge preserved in Amber from India. They found it has “a unique, vesicular structure at the […]
Oldest brain found, according to Nature News 10 October 2012, ABC News in Science, and ScienceDaily 11 October 2012 and Nature DOI: 10.1038/nature11495. ‘ Palaeontologists from China, UK and USA have studied the fossil of an arthropod buried in Cambrian rocks in China, dated as 520 million years old. The fossil, named Fuxianhuia protensa, has […]
Anternet controls seed harvest, according to a report in ScienceDaily 29 August 2012. Biologist Deborah Gordon and computer scientist Balaji Prabhakar of Stanford University have found harvester ants use a system to control the rate of sending out ant foragers that works in the same way internet protocols control data transfer on the Internet. Gordon has been […]