SCIENCE IN THE NEWS WEEKLY
New "Missing Link" Found?
Is Ida truly last month's news? An 11.9 million-year-old fossil with a "surprisingly human" face has been found in Spain, suggesting that human's ape ancestors split from primitive apes in Europe, not Africa. Researchers from the Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Barcelona reported that the species, Anoiapithecus brevirostris, may also represent the last known common ancestor of humans and living great apes.
Archaeologists working in Mexico City may be on the verge of unlocking an extraordinary time capsule. Exploring a site opened up by earthquake damage, the teams' leaders believe that they have found the first tomb of an Aztec ruler. If they are right the site may yield one of the great treasures of antiquity—exciting the imagination of people far beyond academic circles.
Under North America's Lake Huron, robot-assisted archaeologists may have discovered prehistoric American camps and long "drive lanes" built to guide caribou to their deaths, a new study reports in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Dating back 10,000 to 7,500 years, one of the structures in the lake appears to be a line of carefully placed rocks resembling lanes still used by Arctic caribou hunters.
Nathan Murphy, whose discovery of the world's best-preserved dinosaur (a 77-million-year-old duckbilled hadrosaur known as Leonardo) brought scientific acclaim, will serve 60 days in jail for stealing raptor bones from private land. The commercial fossil hunter was convicted in March of felony theft for taking the raptor fossil from a ranch in northern Montana. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 9 in a separate federal case involving more fossils taken from Bureau of Land Management land.
And a new technique has been helping scientists piece together how the Earth's continents were arranged 2.5 billion years ago. The novel method allows scientists to recover rare minerals from rocks, and by analyzing the composition of these minerals, researchers can precisely date ancient volcanic rocks for the first time—aiding in the discovery of rocks rich in ore and oil deposits.
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