MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AFP) — Archaeologists who have been exploring the world’s largest underwater cave — recently discovered in Mexico — presented their findings Monday, including fossils of giant sloths and an elaborate shrine to the Mayan god of commerce. Researchers discovered last month that two large networks of underwater caves in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, the Sac Actun and Dos Ojos networks, are in fact connected, forming the largest such structure on Earth. Diving with […]
Tag: Fossils
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 […]
Fossils may be earliest known multicellular life: study
by Marlowe Hood Agence France Presse PARIS, France (AFP) — Fossils accidentally discovered in South Africa are probably the oldest fungi ever found by a margin of 1.2 billion years, rewriting the evolutionary story of these organisms which are neither flora nor fauna, researchers said Monday. If verified as both fungal and multicellular, the 2.4 billion-year-old microscopic creatures — whose slender filaments are bundled together like brooms — could also be the earliest known specimens of […]





