fossils

Lucy, as we know the best-known australopithecine skeleton in our human family tree, has a new relative thanks to the discovery of fossil remains of jaw and teeth found in the extensive plains of the Afar region, in Ethiopia (Africa) that coincide in time with the remains of this. This new species of hominin, named Australopithecus deyiremeda, lived between 3.3 and 3.5 million years ago.

The discovery has taken place in the Chinese province of Hebei, where members of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology have found a pair of perfectly preserved fossils of this new species, baptized with the name of Archaeornithura meemannae.

Penis worms are a group of marine invertebrates named for their shape so similar to that of the male genital organ. They lived about 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period, when they represented one of the most common organisms on our planet. These animals could reach lengths of up to 39 cm, and they possessed an extendable mouth with sharp hooks, teeth, and spines. It was a fearsome carnivorous worm that buried itself in sediment to catch its prey.

It is a new theropod dinosaur that lived more than 145 million years ago during the Upper Jurassic period. The particular thing about this discovery is that it is a rare specimen: it is a mix of a puma with the hands of a tyrannosaurus that was also not a carnivore but a herbivore. The study, carried out by a team of paleontologists from the "B Rivadavia" Museum of Natural Sciences in Buenos Aires (Argentina) has been published in the journal Nature.

Before dinosaurs appeared on our planet, in the tropical areas of the super continent Pangea, lived one of the main predators whose fossils have been unearthed and studied. It is a species of gigantic salamander that lived 220 million years ago. The research has been published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Morocco has been the scene of the discovery of new fossils of a prehistoric marine creature from 450 million years ago that has revealed new details about the evolution of the ancestors of modern crustaceans, insects and arthropods. The discovery, made by a team of researchers from the universities of Oxford (UK) and Yale (USA), has been published in the journal Nature.

For quite some time (several decades), scientists have been trying to determine when and in what way the genus Homo, our lineage of men, differentiated itself to begin the complex evolutionary process that ended in the humans that we are today. Now, an international team of researchers has made a crucial discovery for the clarification of this issue that concerns us so much: a fossil of a hominid that is 2.8 million years old.

Scientists from Argentina and the United States have discovered in Peru the oldest primate fossil in the American continent known to date, which has been dated at 35 million years.