In a study published in Nature an international team of researchers describe a new species that represents the most primitive member of lepidosaurs, Taytalura alcoberi, found in the Late Triassic deposits of Argentina. Taytalura is the first three-dimensionally preserved early lepidosaur fossil that allowed scientists to infer with great confidence it’s placement in the evolutionary tree of reptiles and aids in closing the gap of our knowledge of the origin and early evolution of lepidosaurs.

Core samples taken from a stand of old growth Douglas-fir trees in the South Beach area just south of Newport showed reduced growth following the 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck the Pacific Northwest in 1700.

In a study published in iScience an international team of researchers describe the first ctenophore fossils ever discovered in the United States. One of the two new species of fossil ctenophores from the mid-Cambrian of Western USA has a preserved nervous system, which illuminates the early evolution of nervous and sensory features in ctenophores.

Deep in the dense coastal forests and marshes of the American Southeast lie shell rings and shell mounds left by Indigenous people 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. Now an international team of researchers, using deep machine learning to assess remote sensing data, has located previously undiscovered shell rings. The researchers hope this will lead to a better understanding of how people lived in that area and a way to identify other, undiscovered shell rings.

A continuous rise in global population has led to fears that conflicts and war will become more frequent as resources dwindle. But this widespread belief has not been quantified based on actual Japanese archaeological data, until now. Researchers from Okayama University have now examined the skeletal remains of people living in the Middle Yayoi period of Japan to set the record straight on the relationship between population pressure and the frequency of violence.

The field of Archaeogenetics has substantially contributed to a better understanding of how the movement and admixture of people across Europe during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages shaped genetic ancestries. However, not all regions are equally well represented in the archaeogenetic record. To fill this gap, researchers of the Max Planck Institutes for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) and the Science of Human History (Jena), University of Vienna and Croatian collaborators from Kaducej Ltd. and the Institute for Anthropological Research have now sequenced whole genomes of 28 individuals from two sites in present-day eastern Croatia and gained new insights into this region’s genetic history and social structures.

Research published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Systematic Palaeontology describes the discovery of three new species of ancient creatures from the dawn of modern mammals, and hints at rapid evolution immediately after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.