3.5 million years ago, when our ancestors were just beginning to walk upright, the real rulers of the Earth were carnivorous birds with hooked beaks who stood up to ten feet tall as they stalked their prey in the grasslands, apex hunters who were even able to compete with the fearsome saber tooth cats in […]

What do you put in your coffee – sugar or sweetener? It’s a question that probably most people avoid, and even fewer people who know the difference between each type of sweetener – natural or artificial. Most would be tempted with the latter – getting the sweetness while dodging the calories. Before we know it, […]

Lakes throughout the United States have withstood a number of invasive species – primarily species of carp – such as a notorious Asian import known for leaping directly into boats in the Great Lakes region, but one recent case in Boulder, Colorado has drawn a great deal of public attention. This outbreak is the result […]

It seems almost unthinkable that out of an infinitely vast universe, there’s no one but us, occupying a small blue dot in a remote galaxy. So is anyone else looking towards us when we watch the stars at night? Or are we really the only ones? Now top NASA scientists are saying it’s almost certain […]

The moon is the result of a primordial collision between a Mars-sized planetary body and our planet, but little else beyond this is certain about the silvery world we can see whenever we look at the sky. Despite 61 space missions, six of which were landings, where astronauts collected moon rock samples, there are a […]

In name, anyway. While “brontosaurus” conjures up a pretty familiar shape – one of the most recognizable dinosaurs, practically synonymous with the word “dinosaur” itself, the word, which means “thunder lizard,” hasn’t carried much scientific weight since the turn of the early 20th century, when it was decided that it bore too much resemblance to […]

Deep in Ethiopia’s Awash Valley about four decades ago, paleontologists came very close to understanding the origin of modern humans when they unearthed Australopithecus afarensis, better known as Lucy, an upright walking ape that lived about 3.2 million years ago, one of our distant ancestors. Now we know that Lucy wasn’t alone – sharing the […]

The Middle Ages has long suffered an unfortunate reputation as being a dark period of violence and superstition. It was a time when disease ran rampant – particularly the infamous Black Death, which may have wiped out as much as one-third of Europe in the 14th century as it made its way from China’s Silk […]

From movies like JAWS, to the real-life ordeal that was the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis, sharks have had a fearsome reputation, as cold-blooded prehistoric killing machines of the ocean. It’s a reputation that led to severe overfishing of these monster fish in the mid-20th century. While they have been roving the ocean depths for […]

Paleontologists recently unearthed another prehistoric crustacean – a predator with four eyes that lived in the Cambrian age and had a variety of claws with limbs, suggesting that the earliest arthropods may have experimented with the possibilities their limbs had. The creatures has been identified as Yawunik kootenayi, and it lived about 508 million years […]