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Researchers have unearthed a new armored dinosaur in Utah, a new species of ankylosaur, known as Akainacephalus johnsoni. The catch? It lived on the lost continent known as Laramidia. A. johnsoni, a member of the ankylosaurid family, lived 76 million years ago in what is now southern Utah, but was once a land mass known as Laramidia, an island continent that split North America in two. Eventually, the sea shrank and the two parts combined to form what is now known as North America. ..." Measuring between 13 and 16 feet in length and 3.5 feet tall, Akainacephalus jonhnsoni is...

A newly found asteroid has been spotted orbiting the Sun, whizzing past the star every 151 days, the shortest orbit of any space rock on record. Known as 2019 LF6, this asteroid is quite large, at 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) across and is part of the "Atira" asteroid group, 20 space rocks whose orbits fall entirely within Earth's. "Thirty years ago, people started organizing methodical asteroid searches, finding larger objects first, but now that most of them have been found, the bigger ones are rare birds," says Quanzhi Ye, a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech who discovered 2019 LF6, in a...

Somebody alert Jeff Bezos: the Moon is shrinking. According to a new research study, the Moon may be shrinking as it experiences lunar quakes, known as "moonquakes." Researchers analyzed 28 moonquakes from 1969 to 1977 and came up with the startling observation that eight of the quakes came from "true tectonic activity — the movement of crustal plates," as opposed to impacts from asteroids or rumblings inside the celestial satellite. “We found that a number of the quakes recorded in the Apollo data happened very close to the faults seen in the [NASA’s Apollo and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter missions] LRO...

A bird that had previously gone extinct came back to life thanks to a rare evolutionary process known as "iterative evolution." The white-throated rail bird can presently be found on the island of Aldabra. Early fossils of the bird suggest it lived there thousands of years ago and died out because it could not fly to higher ground when rising sea levels threatened its safety. But thanks to "iterative evolution," which evolves similar body parts due to genetics from a similar ancestor, the bird came back from the dead. **SNIP** In order to make the determination that the extinct bird...

Talk about a headache. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, the explosion caused such extreme heat that victims' skulls exploded, their blood boiled and their muscles, flesh and brains were replaced with ash, according to a new study. "New investigations on the victims' skeletons unearthed from the ash deposit filling 12 waterfront chambers have now revealed widespread preservation of atypical red and black mineral residues encrusting the bones, which also impregnate the ash filling the intracranial cavity and the ash-bed encasing the skeletons," the study's abstract reads.