Science recap: This week's discoveries include the fossilized skull of a mysterious, prehistoric human species
Tens of thousands of years ago, our species — Homo sapiens — mingled and interbred with other prehistoric humans: our distant cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Hundreds of Neanderthal fossils give us a good idea of their appearance, lives and relationships, but so little is known about Denisovans that they still don't have an official scientific name.
Evidence of their existence has surfaced in faint traces, mapped by DNA markers that lurk in our own genetic makeup and confirmed by only a few fossil fragments.
This week, however, a 146,000-year-old skull dredged out of a well in China in 2018 may just be a key missing piece to this cryptic evolutionary puzzle.
A long time ago
The nearly complete skull did not match any previously known species of prehistoric human.
But two new studies — which researchers say are among the biggest paleoanthropology papers of the year — detail how scientists were able to extract genetic material from the fossil and help unravel this biological mystery.
The DNA sample taken from 'Dragon Man,' as the specimen is called, revealed that he was in fact related to Denisovans, early humans who are thought to have lived between roughly 500,000 and 30,000 years ago.
The finding could be monumental, helping to paint a fuller picture of a time when our own species coexisted with other prehistoric humans.
Across the universe
Astronomers have long grappled with the quandary of 'dark matter,' but plenty of enigmas surround regular matter as well.
The proton-and-neutron-based atoms that we're familiar with are called baryonic matter. And this material is strewn between galaxies like intergalactic fog, making it extremely difficult to measure.
Perhaps, that is, until now.
A new study explains how scientists were able to observe the baryonic matter using the flashing of fast radio bursts.
In a rare encounter, scientists have captured the first-ever footage of an elusive 3-foot-long squid alive in its deep-sea habitat.
Unearthed
Fruit, flowers, birds and musical instruments decorated the walls of a luxury villa — part of a site the excavation team dubbed the 'Beverly Hills' of Roman Britain — before the building was razed roughly 1,800 years ago.
The frescoes were painstakingly pieced together by experts from the Museum of London Archaeology. Han Li, senior building material specialist at MOLA, described the effort as a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity.
Romans invaded modern-day Britain in AD 43 and established Londinium, the precursor to modern London. The occupation lasted for almost 400 years.
Curiosities
Under the life-affirming glow of the sun, methane is a dangerous gas to be avoided.
A heat-trapping chemical pollutant in Earth's atmosphere, methane exacerbates the climate crisis. But within the planet's deep recesses — thousands of feet below the ocean's surface off the US West Coast — the gas can be transformed into a nutritious meal.
At least for spiders.
Scientists say they've discovered three previously unknown species of sea spider living around methane seeps. In these marine habitats where sunlight can't reach, gas escapes through cracks in the seafloor and feeds bacteria that latch on to the spiders' exoskeletons.
The bacteria convert carbon-rich methane and oxygen into sugars and fats the spiders can eat, according to a new study.
The newfound Sericosura sea spiders may pass methane-fueled bacteria to their hatchlings as an easy source of food, the researchers suggest.
Take note
Check out these other must-read science stories from the week:
— A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a routine ground test on Wednesday. Explore how this and other recent setbacks may affect the company's Mars ambitions.
— A tiny brown moth in Australia migrates some 600 miles at night using the stars for navigation — something only humans and birds were known to do before.
— A hunt for ghostly cosmic particles found anomalous signals coming from Antarctic ice. A new detector could help scientists explain what they are.
— Researchers used DNA to reconstruct the face of a prehistoric woman who lived around 10,500 years ago in what's now Belgium, suggesting that skin color already varied considerably among different populations.
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Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
SLO County hills hid fossil treasures from a tropical era millions of years ago
Maybe Templeton High School's mascot should be a crocodile or rhino, not an eagle. Maggie White wrote this article that explains the deep history hidden in the hills of the area on Oct. 25, 1994. TEMPLETON — Imagine Templeton as a tropical seaside paradise overgrown with lush greenery and lined with white beaches along warm waters filled with colorful fish. It's tough to picture this dusty inland ranching town as a thriving shoreline, but 200 million years ago it was. Rex Saint'Onge doesn't just believe that — he's helping to prove it. Saint'Onge is a field associate in vertebrate paleontology — a fancy name for someone who looks for animal fossils — for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. 'I always wanted to be in search of the truth about the Earth's history,' says the San Miguel resident. 'I don't want people to tell me what to think.' The volunteer researcher doesn't have to travel to exotic locations to do his digging for the museum. He can take his picks and brushes and head out to the hills near Adelaide, the dry creekbeds behind his house or the innocuous-looking mounds in Templeton. What he's finding are clues to what the Central Coast was like more than 20 million years ago. It was a place none of us would even recognize, says Saint'Onge. At different periods between 10 million and 23 million years ago — the age of many of the fossils Saint'Onge is discovering — sea water covered much of North America. As the water receded, 75-foot-long whale-eating sharks ruled the local oceans. Mastodons, camels and rhinos roamed where we walk today. Palm trees were abundant, beavers were the size of bears and hippo-like mammals munched on seaweed and shellfish. 'It's kind of romantic to think of that kind of stuff going on here,' Saint'Onge says. 'You go to work every day and you don't think about what the Earth's history is, but you're walking on it.' Saint'Onge searches for fossils — which include bones, teeth, shells and impressions in rock — at hundreds of locations in the county. Some of his most important finds have come out of sites near Templeton, where he was spending a morning digging last week. While most people would pass by the cream-colored hill near town without a second glance, Saint'Onge knows what he's looking for. With a couple of hammer-sized picks, a knife, some small boxes and tubes for his finds and a sifting screen to separate the fossilized treasures from the sand, Saint'Onge can usually find a handful of history. In about half an hour at the site last week, the researcher found a nearly whole mako shark tooth, two smaller shiny black shark teeth, three fish molars and two teeth form a tiny tropical fish known as a surgeon fish. Though the large shark tooth looked the most impressive, it was the least interesting to Saint'Onge — he finds dozens of them. It was the surgeon fish teeth — as tiny as sesame seeds — that were the most important, he said. The tropical teeth are more proof that Templeton was a pre-historic Hawaii. What is also important about the Templeton site is that Saint'Onge is finding fossils from both water and land animals. That means the sandstone mound was once a beach, lagoon or marshy area where the land met the water, he says. Sites like those are rare. 'We never know what we're going to find,' he says. 'That's the neat thing about this site — you had two different things going on.' Saint'Onge has found hundreds of shark, dolphin, sea lion and tropical fish teeth in Templeton, as well as rhino and rodent teeth. He's also turned up a 4-inch tooth from a 75-foot shark called carcharocles megaladon. The Templeton hillside has also produced the county's first — and so far only — pre-historic crocodile tooth, one of Saint'Onge's key discoveries. Until he found the tooth three months ago, researchers had no record that crocodiles — which have remained almost unchanged for millions of years — existed in this area. But the researcher's biggest find is a previously undiscovered bird that may be named after him, the Saint Ongii. In the hills between Paso Robles and Cambria, Saint'Onge found an almost complete, detailed fossil impression in the shale. It was of a new species of a diving bird similar to a gull or shearwater. Because birds' bones are hollow and the feathers decompose, their fossils are extremely hard to come by, the researcher says. This is the first record that the bird existed. Saint'Onge's other finds include fist-sized mastodon molars in San Miguel, whale skulls all over the county, camel bones in Dry Creek in Paso Robles and molars and tusks from desmostylians, an extinct animal similar to a hippo or walrus, in Coalinga. Teeth are the most common finds because they are harder than marrow-filled bone, allowing them to fossilize more easily. 'I'm adding to the fossil record of North America,' he says. Saint'Onge specializes in the Miocene time period — about 23 million to 10 million years ago. In contrast, dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago and man showed up about 5 million years ago. He's been with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as a field researcher since 1988. 'After a couple of hundred finds I guess they decided to give me a chance,' he said. Saint'Onge sends all of his finds to the museum for official identification, aging and cataloging. Though Saint'Onge keeps his sites secret so they aren't picked clean or overrun, he will take an interested amateurs on digs with him to show what to look for. 'Most people throw away 80 to 90 percent of what they're looking for' because the fossils are so small or indistinguishable, he said. It is illegal to collect items from private property without a permit or permission. Saint'Onge has been interested in the pre-historic since his first-grade class took a field trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. 'I saw the dinosaurs and I was hooked,' he said. 'It's the idea that all these things lived on this earth that amazes me,' he said. 'Fossils are like pages in a history book — it's a different way of looking at the world. After living in Southern California for several years and learning about the miocene era there, Saint'Onge moved to San Miguel — partly because he knew this county is a virtually unresearched 'bone bed.' 'Pretty much you can go everywhere and find stuff,' he said. Saint'Onge digs during the day and works at night and Ennis Business Forms in Paso Robles. He's a graphic designer and former illustrator for Warner Bros. cartoon characters. He still creates T-shirt and product packaging designs for them as a freelancer. His wife, Sherry, and children, Rex Jr. and Ashley, help him occasionally on his digs even though they don't share his passion for paleontology. 'But I just cant think of anything else I'd rather be doing.'
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Science recap: This week's discoveries include new clues from the fossil skull of a mysterious human species
Editor's note: A version of this story appeared in CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. Tens of thousands of years ago, our species — Homo sapiens — mingled and interbred with other prehistoric humans: our distant cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Hundreds of Neanderthal fossils give us a good idea of their appearance, lives and relationships, but so little is known about Denisovans that they still don't have an official scientific name. Evidence of their existence has surfaced in faint traces, mapped by DNA markers that lurk in our own genetic makeup and confirmed by only a few fossil fragments. This week, however, a 146,000-year-old skull dredged out of a well in China in 2018 may just be a key missing piece to this cryptic evolutionary puzzle. The nearly complete skull did not match any previously known species of prehistoric human. But two new studies — which researchers say are among the biggest paleoanthropology papers of the year — detail how scientists were able to extract genetic material from the fossil and help unravel this biological mystery. The DNA sample taken from 'Dragon Man,' as the specimen is called, revealed that he was in fact related to Denisovans, early humans who are thought to have lived between roughly 500,000 and 30,000 years ago. The finding could be monumental, helping to paint a fuller picture of a time when our own species coexisted with other prehistoric humans. Astronomers have long grappled with the quandary of 'dark matter,' but plenty of enigmas surround regular matter as well. The proton-and-neutron-based atoms that we're familiar with are called baryonic matter. And this material is strewn between galaxies like intergalactic fog, making it extremely difficult to measure. Perhaps, that is, until now. A new study explains how scientists were able to observe the baryonic matter using the flashing of fast radio bursts. In a rare encounter, scientists have captured the first-ever footage of an elusive 3-foot-long squid alive in its deep-sea habitat. Fruit, flowers, birds and musical instruments decorated the walls of a luxury villa — part of a site the excavation team dubbed the 'Beverly Hills' of Roman Britain — before the building was razed roughly 1,800 years ago. The frescoes were painstakingly pieced together by experts from the Museum of London Archaeology. Han Li, senior building material specialist at MOLA, described the effort as a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity. Romans invaded modern-day Britain in AD 43 and established Londinium, the precursor to modern London. The occupation lasted for almost 400 years. Under the life-affirming glow of the sun, methane is a dangerous gas to be avoided. A heat-trapping chemical pollutant in Earth's atmosphere, methane exacerbates the climate crisis. But within the planet's deep recesses — thousands of feet below the ocean's surface off the US West Coast — the gas can be transformed into a nutritious meal. At least for spiders. Scientists say they've discovered three previously unknown species of sea spider living around methane seeps. In these marine habitats where sunlight can't reach, gas escapes through cracks in the seafloor and feeds bacteria that latch on to the spiders' exoskeletons. The bacteria convert carbon-rich methane and oxygen into sugars and fats the spiders can eat, according to a new study. The newfound Sericosura sea spiders may pass methane-fueled bacteria to their hatchlings as an easy source of food, the researchers suggest. Check out these other must-read science stories from the week: — A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a routine ground test on Wednesday. Explore how this and other recent setbacks may affect the company's Mars ambitions. — A tiny brown moth in Australia migrates some 600 miles at night using the stars for navigation — something only humans and birds were known to do before. — A hunt for ghostly cosmic particles found anomalous signals coming from Antarctic ice. A new detector could help scientists explain what they are. — Researchers used DNA to reconstruct the face of a prehistoric woman who lived around 10,500 years ago in what's now Belgium, suggesting that skin color already varied considerably among different populations. Like what you've read? Oh, but there's more. Sign up here to receive in your inbox the next edition of Wonder Theory, brought to you by CNN Space and Science writers Ashley Strickland, Katie Hunt and Jackie Wattles. They find wonder in planets beyond our solar system and discoveries from the ancient world.
CNN
4 hours ago
- CNN
Science recap: This week's discoveries include the fossilized skull of a mysterious, prehistoric human species
Tens of thousands of years ago, our species — Homo sapiens — mingled and interbred with other prehistoric humans: our distant cousins, the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Hundreds of Neanderthal fossils give us a good idea of their appearance, lives and relationships, but so little is known about Denisovans that they still don't have an official scientific name. Evidence of their existence has surfaced in faint traces, mapped by DNA markers that lurk in our own genetic makeup and confirmed by only a few fossil fragments. This week, however, a 146,000-year-old skull dredged out of a well in China in 2018 may just be a key missing piece to this cryptic evolutionary puzzle. A long time ago The nearly complete skull did not match any previously known species of prehistoric human. But two new studies — which researchers say are among the biggest paleoanthropology papers of the year — detail how scientists were able to extract genetic material from the fossil and help unravel this biological mystery. The DNA sample taken from 'Dragon Man,' as the specimen is called, revealed that he was in fact related to Denisovans, early humans who are thought to have lived between roughly 500,000 and 30,000 years ago. The finding could be monumental, helping to paint a fuller picture of a time when our own species coexisted with other prehistoric humans. Across the universe Astronomers have long grappled with the quandary of 'dark matter,' but plenty of enigmas surround regular matter as well. The proton-and-neutron-based atoms that we're familiar with are called baryonic matter. And this material is strewn between galaxies like intergalactic fog, making it extremely difficult to measure. Perhaps, that is, until now. A new study explains how scientists were able to observe the baryonic matter using the flashing of fast radio bursts. In a rare encounter, scientists have captured the first-ever footage of an elusive 3-foot-long squid alive in its deep-sea habitat. Unearthed Fruit, flowers, birds and musical instruments decorated the walls of a luxury villa — part of a site the excavation team dubbed the 'Beverly Hills' of Roman Britain — before the building was razed roughly 1,800 years ago. The frescoes were painstakingly pieced together by experts from the Museum of London Archaeology. Han Li, senior building material specialist at MOLA, described the effort as a 'once in a lifetime' opportunity. Romans invaded modern-day Britain in AD 43 and established Londinium, the precursor to modern London. The occupation lasted for almost 400 years. Curiosities Under the life-affirming glow of the sun, methane is a dangerous gas to be avoided. A heat-trapping chemical pollutant in Earth's atmosphere, methane exacerbates the climate crisis. But within the planet's deep recesses — thousands of feet below the ocean's surface off the US West Coast — the gas can be transformed into a nutritious meal. At least for spiders. Scientists say they've discovered three previously unknown species of sea spider living around methane seeps. In these marine habitats where sunlight can't reach, gas escapes through cracks in the seafloor and feeds bacteria that latch on to the spiders' exoskeletons. The bacteria convert carbon-rich methane and oxygen into sugars and fats the spiders can eat, according to a new study. The newfound Sericosura sea spiders may pass methane-fueled bacteria to their hatchlings as an easy source of food, the researchers suggest. Take note Check out these other must-read science stories from the week: — A SpaceX Starship rocket exploded during a routine ground test on Wednesday. Explore how this and other recent setbacks may affect the company's Mars ambitions. — A tiny brown moth in Australia migrates some 600 miles at night using the stars for navigation — something only humans and birds were known to do before. — A hunt for ghostly cosmic particles found anomalous signals coming from Antarctic ice. A new detector could help scientists explain what they are. — Researchers used DNA to reconstruct the face of a prehistoric woman who lived around 10,500 years ago in what's now Belgium, suggesting that skin color already varied considerably among different populations.
