Scientific American

Ancient Time: Earliest Mayan Astronomical Calendar Unearthed in Guatemala Ruins

Thu, 10 May 2012 14:01:00 EST

An excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year --in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.)

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Recommended: Bird Sense

Fri, 04 May 2012 12:00:00 EST

Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird [More]

Stonehenge Had Lecture Hall Acoustics

Thu, 03 May 2012 16:35:00 EST

The stone slabs of England's Stonehenge may have been more than just a spectacular sight to the ancient people who built the structure; they likely created an acoustic environment unlike anything they normally experienced, new research hints.

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Giant Flealike Pest Put the Bite on Dinosaurs

Thu, 03 May 2012 16:15:00 EST

Paleo-pests about 10 times bigger than today's fleas may have sneaked up on a huge dinosaur, crawled onto its soft underbelly and taken a bite, likely a painful one, say researchers who have discovered fossils of the flealike organisms.

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Triumph of the Titans: How Sauropods Flourished (preview)

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:00:00 EST

Ever since fossils of the behemoth, long-necked dinosaurs known as sauropods surfaced in England nearly 170 years ago, they have awed and confused scientists. Even when the great English anatomist Sir Richard Owen recognized in 1842 that dinosaurs constituted a group of their own, apart from reptiles, he excluded the gigantic bones later classified as sauropods. Instead he interpreted them as belonging to a type of aquatic crocodile, which he had named Cetiosaurus, or “whale lizard,” for the enormous size of its bones. Nearly 30 years later, in 1871, University of Oxford geologist John Phillips would report the discovery of a Cetiosaurus skeleton sufficiently complete to reveal that, far from being an aquatic crocodile, the animal spent at least some of its time on land.

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Killer Chimps and Funny Feet: Report from the AAPA Conference

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:27:08 EST

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Melting Glaciers Liberate Ancient Microbes

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:15:00 EST

Editor's Note: This article is an extended version of " Bugs in the Ice Sheet " from the May 2012 Issue of Scientific American .

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Bugs in the Ice Sheet

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EST

Locked in frozen vaults in Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Once thought to be too harsh and inhospitable to support any living thing, the polar ice sheets are now known to be a gigantic reservoir of microbial life, trapped longer than modern humans have walked the planet.

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"Breathtaking" Mummy Coffin Covers Seized in Israel

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:45:00 EST

Two decorated covers of coffins that once contained mummies have been seized by Israeli authorities, authenticated and dated to thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt.

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Antarctica's Lake Vostok May Hold Extreme Life

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EST

Far below the surface of the central East Antarctic ice sheet is a body of water 160 miles long by 30 miles across known as Lake Vostok. The Vostok research station above it, for which it was named, was built by the former Soviet Union in 1957 and is now operated by Russia. Even by Antarctic standards, it is a brutal place, with the dubious honor of holding the record for the lowest measured temperature anywhere on the planet, a mind- (if not body-) numbing –129 degrees Fahrenheit (–89 degrees Celsius).

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New Images of Titanic Wreck Revealed

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:35:00 EST

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Ancient Human Had Feet Like an Ape [Video]

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:00:00 EST

A fossil discovered in Ethiopia suggests that humans' prehistoric relatives may have lived in the trees for a million years longer than was previously thought.

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Animals through the Ages: The Art of Charles R. Knight [Slide Show]

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:00:00 EST

Charles R. Knight (1874 – 1953) is best known for his arresting paintings of dinosaurs and other long-vanished beasts. In the April issue of Scientific American, anthropologist and science historian Richard Milner--author of Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time --explores the experiences that shaped Knight as an artist and the influence his work had on science and popular culture. This slide show presents a selection of images from the book depicting both living animals and extinct ones.

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First of Our Kind: Could Australopithecus sediba Be Our Long Lost Ancestor? (preview)

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:45:00 EST

Sometime between three million and two million years ago, perhaps on a primeval savanna in Africa, our ancestors became recognizably human. For more than a million years their australopithecine predecessors--Lucy and her kind, who walked upright like us yet still possessed the stubby legs, tree-climbing hands and small brains of their ape forebears--had thrived in and around the continent’s forests and woodlands. But their world was changing. Shifting climate favored the spread of open grasslands, and the early australopithecines gave rise to new lineages. One of these offshoots evolved long legs, toolmaking hands and an enormous brain. This was our genus, Homo , the primate that would rule the planet.

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Field Notes: A Visit to an Early Human Death Trap [Videos and Slide Show]

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 10:43:00 EST

In late November 2011 I went to Johannesburg, South Africa, to meet the newest member of the human family, a nearly two million–year-old creature dubbed Australopithecus sediba. First announced in 2010, its fossilized bones have caused quite a commotion in paleoanthropological circles--and with good reason. They are some of the most complete early hominins (the group that includes modern humans and their extinct relatives) ever found, and they exhibit a combination of apelike and humanlike traits that no one would have predicted. Think ape arm with human hand, ape heelbone adjoining human anklebone. In the cover story of the April issue , I describe the unexpected discovery of the fossils and explore the latest thinking on where Australopithecus sediba fits in our family tree. Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, who found the fossils, thinks A. sediba could be the ancestor of our genus, Homo; other scientists disagree. Here's a short video of Berger talking about one of the two most complete skeletons from the site. The story continues below it.

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Worm Discovery Illuminates How Our Brains Might Have Evolved

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 07:30:00 EST

Our earliest invertebrate ancestors did not have brains. Yet, over hundreds of millions of years, we and other vertebrates have developed amazingly complicated mental machinery. "It must have evolutionary roots somewhere, but where?" wrote Henry Gee, an editor at Nature, in an essay published in the journal's March 15 issue. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

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Jawless Vertebrate Had World's Sharpest Teeth

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 20:00:00 EST

From Nature magazine

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Illustrating the Lost Continent

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:05:00 EST

We are continually trying to illuminate things from the past, present and future. For this feature, we needed to depict rarely illustrated dinosaur species. We turned to James Gurney because he is adept at constructing lost worlds. Here is a short "how-to" lesson on how he went about re-creating long-extinct dinosaurs, making them come to life on our pages.

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Dinosaurs of the Lost Continent (preview)

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

On a cool September morning in 2010 my crew and I began our daily descent from camp back into deep time, walking single file down a steep, knife-edge ridge of sandstone and mudstone in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Each of us carried water, a field notebook, lunch, a rock hammer and other hand tools. Heavier tools and materials--rock saws, picks, shovels, bags of plaster and swaths of burlap--awaited us half a mile away at the dig site. Even from the hilltop we could easily see the plaster jackets down in the quarry--alabaster beacons in a wilderness of arid, gray-striped badlands. Some of the irregular lumps were not much bigger than a loaf of bread. Others spanned 10 feet and tipped the scales at more than a ton. All contained the bony remains of animals that coexisted here 76 million years ago.

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The Science and Art of Neandertal Teeth [Slide Show]

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 07:30:00 EST

Of all the human ancestors represented in the fossil record, Neandertals are the best known. A significant proportion of what scientists have learned about the Neandertals is based on a set of remains that the Croatian paleontologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger recovered between 1899 and 1905 from a rock shelter in the town of Krapina, some 60 kilometers north of Zagreb. The Krapina sample dates to between 120,000 and 130,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, and includes multiple representatives of nearly every bone and tooth of the body.

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