Today were taking a peek at a dinosaur egg that was part of a study published today in Current Biology. This dinosaur egg is one of a collection of eggs that were found in Patagonia, Argentina. The difference between this egg and the other eggs that were discovered and analyzed in the past is the near-intact embryonic skull inside.
According to a new study published this week by researchers at the University of Illinois, a nearby star's supernova may've caused one of out planets mass extinctions millions of years ago. The event studied here took place in the Late Devonian, "culminating in extinction events near the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary." Evidence shown in the study published this week suggests that asteroids weren't the only thing that killed massive amounts of life on Earth in the distant past.
How much will you pay for a piece of history? For some, that momento is priceless, to the point that they'd pay six digits just to have exclusive ownership of what would otherwise be a footnote in the annals of history. That definitely seems to be the amusing yet completely unsurprising case of a sealed and pristine copy of Super Mario Bros. for the Nintendo Entertainment System, a copy that has become historical in two senses, breaking records as the most expensive sale of a single game.
As part of the gaming "Play Apart Together" campaign going on here in the summer of global pandemic, Ubisoft's giving away a couple games. They're releasing Discovery Tour: Ancient Greece, and Discovery Tour: Ancient Egypt, both for free, in a window one week long. Where Assassin's Creed is a game about historical missions run by ancient hunters of humans, Discovery Tour is all about the history - without all the violence.
We thought the subject of the research published this week seemed familiar. Back in the year 2016, SlashGear featured a story on the possibility that ancient monkeys crossed a large body of water to move from one continent to another. Now, here in 2020, a new finding ancient monkey teeth has a completely new set of researchers suggesting that a different set of monkeys ALSO made a trip across a large body of water to live in a new land.
A group of researchers found the world's oldest piece of string ever strung by a humanoid. This very, very old piece of string was found in a cave in France and described in the journal Scientific Reports. The string was likely constructed and used by Neanderthals at least 41-thousand years ago. This is a very significant piece of old string.
A new bit of research published by the National Academy of Sciences showed evidence of one of the first creatures on this planet with a mouth and a butt. More specifically, this fossil called Ikaria wariootia, is one of the oldest known bilaterians. A bilaterian is an animal with two openings and a trough-gut.
In Washington D.C., the Museum of the Bible commissioned independent investigators to conduct research into the authenticity of their most valuable possessions. They had a collection of the "Dead Sea Scrolls", a set of texts, fragments of what were supposed to be the oldest known surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible. Unfortunate for them, all 16 fragments in the museum's collection were forgeries.
While modern video games and gamers are more obsessed with mods and, sometimes, hacking to modify behavior and gain an upper hand, the console games of old had very little room for after-market modification. Instead, game developers would often sneak in some obscure techniques to make gamers' lives a bit easier or at least more amusing, a strategy that gave birth to an Easter egg culture that continues to exist today. One of the most popular and more usable Easter eggs is the now iconic Konami Code whose original programmer just died at 61 years of age.
Who loves public domain access to tons of historically significant and utterly beautiful contend... now in 3D? With the internationally recognized Creative Commons Zero (CCO) license in effect, The Smithsonian launched their Open Access initiative this week to the public for the first time. This system's launch included approximately 2.8 million 2D images and 3D models, rolling the lot directly into the public domain for all to enjoy - and use!
A slab of stone the size of a small child was discovered in southern Turkey with clues pointing to a lost civilization. "My colleague Michele Massa and I rushed straight there, and we could see it still sticking out of the water, so we jumped right down into the canal—up to our waists wading around," said Asst. Prof. James Osborne of the Oriental Institute. "Right away, it was clear it was ancient."
A Neanderthal skeleton, the first to be excavated in 25 years, has thrown preconceptions around the so-called Neanderthal burial debate back into disarray, suggesting funeral rites may not be a uniquely homo-sapien affair. Further exploration of remains in Shanidar Cave, a remote cache of Neanderthal bones in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, built on speculation from the mid-20th Century that our assumptions about the extinct species may be incorrect.