Magazine

July-August 2018

Current Issue

July-August 2018

Volume: 106 Number: 4

FOSSIL EVIDENCE OF REPTILE PARENTING? In 2014, an exquisite fossil of a small caiman-like reptile, Philydrosaurus, was found in today’s Liaoning, China, in rock from a lake bed dating to the Early Cretaceous period. Mere inches away from the fossilized adult were seven juveniles of the same species, all large enough to be at least a few weeks old. This exciting discovery implies that this group of aquatic reptiles, choristoderes, cared for their young. Because crocodilians and dinosaurs share a common ancestor with choristoderes and also care for their young, it may be that this behavior is the ancestral condition in all reptiles. In “Mystery of the Lost Reptiles,” paleontologist Daniel T. Ksepka writes about this diverse and long-overlooked group of aquatic reptiles, and explores why they survived the extinction that wiped out the nonavian dinosaurs, but then declined mysteriously during the Cenozoic era. (Illustration by Emma Skurnick.)

In This Issue

  • Art
  • Astronomy
  • Biology
  • Communications
  • Engineering
  • Environment
  • Evolution
  • Medicine
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  • Policy
  • Psychology
  • Sociology
  • Technology

Mystery of the Lost Reptiles

Daniel T. Ksepka

Evolution

High-Tech Homelessness

Virginia Eubanks

Anthropology Policy Technology

Automated algorithms are designed to more efficiently match the unhoused with shelter, but such databases leave the poor vulnerable to privacy and rights breaches.

Maxwell Zombies: Conjuring the Thermodynamic Undead

Daniel Peter Sheehan

Engineering Physics

Modern descendants of Maxwell’s celebrated demon defy standard thinking about heat engines and may offer a path to a new kind of energy generation.

Learning to See

Gene Tracy

Anthropology

The most brilliant scientific insight depends, like the everyday faculty of sight, on distinguishing meaningful signals from among random ones.

Scientists' Nightstand

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