by Sara HUSSEIN Agence France-Presse TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — Scientists had nicknamed it “The Thing” — a mysterious football-sized fossil discovered in Antarctica that sat in a Chilean museum awaiting someone who could work out just what it was. Now, analysis has revealed the mystery fossil to be a soft-shelled egg, the largest ever found, laid some 68 million years ago, possibly by a type of extinct sea snake or lizard. The revelation ends nearly […]
Tag: Dinosaurs
Ticked off: Tiny ‘dracula’ with a taste for dino blood
by Mariëtte Le Roux Agence France-Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Dinosaurs, the most fearsome creatures ever to walk the Earth, were bugged already 100 million years ago by a paltry pest that still plagues animals today: the bloodsucking tick, scientists have discovered. Preserved for eternity in amber, fossilised tree resin, researchers have found a hard tick — uncannily similar to those we know — clinging to a 99-million-year-old dinosaur feather, a team wrote in the […]





