prehistoric

It took a decade of painstaking study, the cooperation of hundreds of researchers, and a database of more than 200,000 fossil records, but John Alroy thinks he’s disproved much of the conventional wisdom about the diversity of marine fossils and extinction rates.
Alroy, a researcher with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at […]

Rebecca Morelle of BBC News reports:
Archaeologists carrying out an excavation at Stonehenge say they have broken through to a layer that may finally explain why the site was built.
The team has reached sockets that once held bluestones — smaller stones, most now missing or uprooted, which formed the site’s original structure.
The researchers believe that the […]

Geologists at the University of Leicester have solved a puzzle found in rocks half a billion years old.
Some of the most important fossil beds in the world are the Burgess Shales in the Canadian Rockies. Once an ancient sea bed, they were formed shortly after life suddenly became more complex and diverse - the so-called […]

New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.
What is the genetic mutation
“Originally, we all […]