Homo sapiens, the ancestor of modern humans, shared the planet with Neanderthals, a close, heavy-set relative that dwelled almost exclusively in Ice-Age Europe, until some 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals were similar to Homo sapiens, with whom they sometimes mated — but they were different, too. Among these many differences, Neanderthals were shorter and stockier, with […]
Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a record low wintertime maximum extent for the second year in a row, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA. Every year, the cap of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and its neighboring seas melts during […]
Some might say it takes a rare breed to survive the Alaska wilderness. The discovery of a possible new species of hybrid butterfly from the state’s interior is proving that theory correct. Belonging to a group known as the Arctics, the Tanana Arctic, Oeneis tanana, is the first new butterfly species described from the […]
In 1958, an amateur fossil collector named Francis Tully discovered a prehistoric animal so bizarre that it could only be termed a “monster.” Nearly sixty years later, Field Museum scientists, along with colleagues at Yale, Argonne National Laboratory, and the American Museum of Natural History, have finally figured out what it is. Tully monsters […]