Biologist Stacia Backensto has fooled a raven. When trying to recapture birds on Alaska’s North Slope during her graduate student days at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, she wore a moustache and beard. She also strapped pillows to her waist. “By the time I got around to the beard and the duct-taping of the […]
Wow, do Alaskans love bats! Last week’s column on little brown bats inspired three times the comments I usually get. People rang in with bat sightings from Nikiski to North Pole; a few offered up their secret spots to scientists who might want to study bats. Jesika Reimer, a bat expert and consultant who lives […]
Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and other recent human relatives may have begun hunting large mammal species down to size — by way of extinction — at least 90,000 years earlier than previously thought, says a new study published in the journal Science. Elephant-dwarfing wooly mammoths, elephant-sized ground sloths and various saber-toothed cats highlighted the array of […]
The timing of the first entry of humans into North America across the Bering Strait has now been set back 10,000 years. This has been demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt by Ariane Burke, a professor in Université de Montréal’s Department of Anthropology, and her doctoral student Lauriane Bourgeon, with the contribution of […]