Natural Science Forum / Biology / Paleontology / September 2008

According to paleontologist Jim Gehling, "we're all just sponges." That's
what he said when describing the discovery of the earliest evidence of
mulit-cellular life on Earth--they're "cauliflower" critters roughly 650
million years old found in Australia. The newly described fossil ...

Research pushes back history of crop development 10,000 years
Researchers led by Dr Robin Allaby of the University of Warwick's plant research arm Warwick HRI have found evidence that genetics supports the idea that the emergence of agriculture in prehistory took much longer than ...

Updated Three-Stage Model for the Peopling of the Americas
Connie J. Mulligan1, Andrew Kitchen1, Michael M. Miyamoto2
1 Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, United States of America,
2 Department of Zoology, University of Florida, Gainesville, ...

Tribal war drove human evolution of aggression
Wars are costly in terms of lives and resources - so why have we fought them throughout human history? In modern times, states may fight wars for a number of complex reasons. But in the past, most tribal wars were fought for the most ...

Archaeologists trace early irrigation farming in ancient Yemen
In the remote desert highlands of southern Yemen, a team of archaeologists have discovered new evidence of ancient transitions from hunting and herding to irrigation agriculture 5,200 years ago.
As part of a larger ...

Graveyards, fossils, etc. from period of swampy Sahara
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080814/sc_afp/usnigerarcheology;_ylt=Ai1Su2iqEZLlZ
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What is the difference between a Komodo dragon and a dinosaur?
(Not being a scientist, I've never heard the strict definition of a
dinosaur, aside from the fact that they died off 65 million years ago
- so if I hadn't seen labelled photos of Komodo dragons quite often, I