Archaeologists have found 115,000-year-old human footprints where they shouldn’t be. Fossilized footprints in Saudi Arabia show evidence of human movement on the cusp of the next ice age. Study of preserved tracks in New Mexico continues to shed light on the first human movements across North America.

Scientists are discovering and resurrecting ancient viruses trapped in permafrost and frozen remains. Trapped in frigid Arctic soils and riverbeds, the world is teeming with ancient microbes. Bacteria and viruses that existed thousands of years ago are frozen in time within prehistoric layers of permafrost. Rising temperatures could cause much of the ice to melt, freeing these microbes from their icy prisons. The viruses found are harmless, but other microbes, as yet unknown, could be released and…

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Layered rocks in Western Australia are among the earliest known forms of life on Earth, according to a new study. The fossils in question are stromatolites, layered rocks formed by the secretions of photosynthetic microbes. The oldest stromatolites, which scientists believe were created by living organisms, date back 3.43 billion years, but there are older examples. Stromatolites dating back 3.48 billion years have been found in the Dresser Formation in Western Australia.

New research suggests that salt crystals from Central Australia contain ancient microorganisms that became trapped 830 million years ago, and there is a chance that some of the microorganisms are still alive. The single-celled organisms are trapped in tiny pockets of liquid – smaller than the width of a human hair – in halite, or salt, from a sedimentary rock formation.

Fossil evidence of an ancient rainforest has recently been discovered in West Antarctica. A thriving temperate rainforest grew in West Antarctica about 90 million years ago, according to a new study, based on newly discovered fossil roots, pollen and spores.

Exceptionally preserved plant fossils of 350 million-year-old strange bushy trees have been discovered in southeastern Canada. In the UK, researchers have discovered a fossil forest of small, palm-like trees and arthropod tracks dating back to the Middle Devonian. Petrified trees discovered by chance in southwest England belong to the oldest known forest on Earth, a new study has found. The 390-million-year-old fossils displace the 386-million-year-old Gilboa Fossil Forest in New York state as the oldest known forest…

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Scientists define a mass extinction as the extinction of about three-quarters of all species over a short geological period of time, which is less than 2.8 million years, according to The Conversation. Right now, humans are at the beginning of the last mass extinction, which is moving much faster than any other. Since 1970, vertebrate species populations have declined by an average of 68%, and more than 35,000 species are currently considered threatened with extinction, according to…

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At the end of the Permian period 252 million years ago, Earth was devastated by a mass extinction that wiped out more than 90% of the planet’s species. Compared to other mass extinctions, the recovery from the Great Dying was slow: it took at least 10 million years for the planet to be repopulated and begin to restore its diversity. The largest mass extinction in Earth’s history may have been triggered by a strong El Niño cycle.…

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A living fossil is a species that has not changed significantly over millions of years and closely resembles its ancestors found in the fossil record. Charles Darwin coined the term “living fossil” in 1859 to describe living species that still looked like their ancestors millions of years ago and were often the last surviving lineage. Anatomically, these species tend to appear unchanged, although genetically, the species are constantly evolving. Plate tectonic activity has had a profound effect…

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Archaeologists in Norway have discovered a cemetery dating from 800 to 200 BCE, where mostly children were buried. Because the remains of nearly 40 children, all under the age of 6, were found there, experts are unsure what prompted the discovery of these remains in Norway. Each grave was marked by carefully placed, symmetrical stone circles. The group of 41 stone circles near Fredrikstad in southeastern Norway puzzled the team of archaeologists when they first discovered them.…

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Archaeologists recently discovered the lost ruins of a ceremonial temple buried in sand and estimated to be between 4,000 and 5,000 years old in northwestern Peru. The team first discovered the walls, then uncovered a series of features that suggested the structure had once been a temple. Then came the skeletal remains of three adults, hidden between the walls.

In 2022, FSB officers in the Tula region detained a “black digger” who, during illegal excavations in the territory of Greater Tula, found a unique treasure trove containing women’s jewelry from the era of the Middle Sarmatian culture of the 1st-2nd centuries AD. The treasure was transferred to the funds of the Kulikovo Pole State Museum-Reserve and is being prepared for exhibition, and archaeologists have begun studying the ancient settlement. In Krasnoyarsk, SFU scientists found more than…

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LiDAR technology in Ireland reveals hidden structures that could guide spirits into the afterlife. A child’s burial site from the 4th millennium BC was found in Armenia.

DNA has revealed incest, smallpox and violent deaths among Christians living in caves in medieval Spain. And a Stone Age burial site in France, used for 800 years, is made up almost entirely of men; ancient DNA shows they are heavily related.

The first medieval necropolis has been discovered in Veliky Novgorod. A 1,700-year-old “barbarian” burial site has been discovered on the border of the Roman Empire in Germany. Archaeologists in Kazakhstan have discovered 10 kurgans, or burial mounds, dating back to the Middle Ages, and some of them have “whiskers.”

New research suggests that all life today descended from a cell that lived 4.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed. This last universal common ancestor, affectionately nicknamed LUCA by biologists, wasn’t all that different from the fairly complex bacteria that exist today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with other life and viruses.

And paleontologists and geneticists are finding more and more evidence to support this fact. Using fossils and genetic dating, scientists have put forward very different candidates for the role of the world’s first animal. Today, animals of all shapes and sizes roam the Earth, from nearly microscopic creatures like tardigrades to 80-foot (25-meter) blue whales. These organisms emerged and developed over millions of years of evolution. But which animal was the first on the planet?

Jaws found in 500-million-year-old fossils. A new study by scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has concluded that O. alata was likely one of the first arthropods with lower jaws, a departure from previous research that suggested the animal may have been a filter feeder.

Tens of millions of years ago, South America and Africa were part of the same landmass, an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana. At some point, the two continents began to drift apart until only a thin strip of land remained above, holding them together. A team of scientists in a new study argues that matching dinosaur tracks found in what are now Brazil and Cameroon were left along this narrow passage 120 million years ago, before the continents…

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A newly discovered dinosaur may have spent part of its life underground. Paleontologists have recently uncovered a new fossilized animal — and this time, it’s a burrower. Fona herzogae, discovered in Utah by researchers and paleontologists from North Carolina State University, was a small, herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Cenomanian period — about 100 to 66 million years ago.