News by Subject Biology

The average body size of humans has fluctuated significantly over the last million years and is strongly linked to temperature. Colder, harsher climates drove the evolution of larger body sizes, while warmer climates led to smaller bodies. Brain size also changed dramatically but did not evolve in tandem with body size.

A team based at the University of Kansas and China performed fieldwork in the Junggar Basin to discover two fossil teeth belonging to two separate specimens of bat, dubbed Altaynycteris aurora. It's the oldest fossil of bat found in Asia.

Using an exceptionally preserved fossil from South Africa, a particle accelerator, and high-powered x-rays, an international team including a University of Minnesota researcher has discovered that not all dinosaurs breathed in the same way.

The UPV/EHU's Vertebrate Palaeontology research group has described two new species of palaeotheriidae mammals that inhabited the subtropical landscape of Zambrana (Álava) about 37 million years ago. Their atypical dental features could point to a difference in environmental conditions between the Iberian and Central European areas.

In 2016, researchers from the University of Liège (Belgium) proposed a new definition of the geological boundary between the Devonian and Carboniferous periods (359 million years). This new definition has been tested by hundreds of researchers around the world and the results are now compiled in a special issue of the journal Palaeodiversity & Palaeoenvironments.

An international team of scientists has used high-powered X-rays at the European Synchrotron, the ESRF, to show how an extinct South African 200-million-year-old dinosaur, Heterodontosaurus tucki, breathed. The study is published in elife on 6 July 2021.

Dinosaurs were generally huge, but a new study of the unusual alvarezsaurs show that they reduced in size about 100 million years ago when they became specialised ant-eaters.

Since the discovery of the first fossil remains, the image of the Neanderthal has been one of a primitive hominin. People have known for a long time that Neanderthals were able to fashion tools and weapons. But could they also make jewellery or even art? Researchers from Göttingen University and the Lower Saxony State Office for Heritage analysed a new find from the Unicorn Cave in the Harz Mountains in Germany and conclude that Neanderthals had remarkable cognitive abilities.

Scientists recently made news by using fossil shark scales to reconstruct shark communities from millions of years ago. At the same time, an international team of researchers led by UC Santa Barbara ecologist Erin Dillon applied the technique to the more recent past.

Earth-historical events such as ice ages or the shifting of continental plates are mainly responsible for the evolutionary success of proboscideans, but also for their decline. This is the main conclusion of a study published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution by an international research team from Spain, Finland, Great Britain, Germany and Argentina with the participation of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin.