The closest living things to dinosaurs need to be taken a look at in terms of classification of species. Dinosaurs are classified as reptiles, a group that includescrocodiles, lizards, turtles, and snakes. Of this large group of animals, other than birds, crocodiles are the closest living thin...
Godfrey-Smith is fascinated by octopuses and their evolutionarily related cousins cuttlefish and squid. The last common ancestor that their branch of the tree of life had with us, or other mammals, or birds, or fish, or dinosaurs, was about six hundred million years ago. It was a small fla...
Archosaurs are a clade of reptiles (a group defined by a common ancestor) that includes the dinosaurs and by extension modern birds, as well as crocodiles. The flying pterosaurs are also Archosaurs, having evolved between crocodiles and dinosaurs. The marine reptiles Mosasaur and Plesiosaur, on ...
The team plans to first design a genome for the tiger and compare it to the dunnart, its closest living relative. Scientists will then use CRISPR gene editing technology to eventually create an embryo. “We then take living cells from our dunnart and edit their DNA every place where it diff...
Even after life became complex and differentiated, and animals overran both the oceans and continents, mammals wouldn’t arrive until relatively recently in natural history. It wasn’t until a mass extinction event took away most of the dinosaurs and reptiles that mammals finally emerged as a me...
Answer to: Certain types of dinosaurs were bipedal (walked on two legs). What is a good reason that these creatures invariably had long tails if...
Homo erectus became the first direct human ancestor to leave Africa, and the first to display evidence that they harnessed fire. Homo habilis was likely driven to extinction more than a million years ago, as were the last of the Australopithecines....
The more shocking, the more impossible, the discovery, the more likely it is to someday be seen as the harbinger of a “scientific revolution” — a whole new world created over decades by scientists who adopt the new paradigm. That’s one side of the scientific coin. The other side, ...
We released a publicationthat, for me, comes full circle with research that started my career off. Back in 1995 when I started my PhD, I thought it would be great to use biomechanical models and simulations to test how extinct dinosaurs likeTyrannosaurus rexmight have moved (or not), taking...
Megalania skull, at Museum of Science, Boston One theory of how Megalania became extinct is thatafter Diprotodon and Procoptodon died off, there was not enough food to sustain such a large reptile, and slowly the population died to extinction. ...