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For cultured meat—which has gone by many names including lab-grown meat, clean meat, or slaughter-free meat—the question has not been “if” but “when.” The development of growing animal cells into edible meat has continued, only the timeline was uncertain. Back in 2016, an Israeli company called SuperMeat even took a guess, suggesting their lab-grown chicken would be available by July 2021. Turns out they weren’t far off, but they also weren’t the first ones to get there. This weekend, Eat Just—which until recently was best known for its plant-based Just Egg—will become the first company in the world to have...

Sequence captured on bank of Lake ApopkaWhen it comes to nature in Florida, expect the unexpected. You never know what you might stumble across, and a sequence of photos showing Great Blue Heron devouring a juvenile alligator proves it. Danny Gilliam shared photos on his Facebook page on Dec. 6, showing a “large juvenile alligator” being eaten in whole by a Heron on the bank of Lake Apopka. Honestly, it’s mesmerizing and shocking, and many on social media agreed because his post went viral with more than 71,000 shares as of Tuesday morning. One might think alligators have the upper...

Pterosaurs with these types of beaks are better known at the time period from North Africa, so it would be reasonable to assume a likeness to the North African Alanqa. Credit: Attributed to Davide Bonadonna ======================================================================= Paleontologists have made a surprising discovery while searching through 100-year-old fossil collections from the UK – a new mystery species of pterosaur, unlike anything seen before. Lead author of the project, University of Portsmouth PhD student Roy Smith, discovered the mystery creature amongst fossil collections housed in the Sedgwick Museum of Cambridge and the Booth Museum at Brighton that were assembled when phosphate mining...

Ecological reconstruction of Kylinxia. Credit: Huang Diying ========================================================================== The arthropods have been among the most successful animals on Earth since the Cambrian Period, about 520 million years ago. They are the most familiar and ubiquitous, and constitute nearly 80 percent of all animal species today, far more than any other animals. But how did arthropods evolve and what did their ancestors look like? These have been a major conundrum in animal evolution puzzling generations of scientists for more than a century. Now researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) have discovered...

To understand how and why color is preserved in some amber fossils but not in others, and whether the colors seen in fossils are the same as the ones insects paraded more than 99 million years ago, the researchers used a diamond knife blades to cut through the exoskeleton of two of the colorful amber wasps and a sample of normal dull cuticle. Using electron microscopy, they were able to show that colorful amber fossils have a well-preserved exoskeleton nanostructure that scatters light. The unaltered nanostructure of colored insects suggested that the colors preserved in amber may be the same...

Human communities in the Levant at this time were known as Natufian. They were primarily hunters and foragers and are considered the first non-nomadic society; the semi-sedentary habits of Natufian culture were likely a precursor to humans settling down and becoming farmers. At the el-Wad Terrace settlement, the site was densely layered with animal remains, of which "a high percentage" belonged to lizards and snakes, the researchers reported in a new study, published online June 10 in the journal Scientific Reports. The quantity of squamate bones at the site was astonishing; that alone hinted at human consumption as a possible...

Named Antarcticoolithus bradyi, the new fossil is the first fossilized egg found in Antarctica. The specimen exceeds eggs of all known non-avian dinosaurs in volume and differs from them in structure. Measuring 29 by 20 cm (11.4 by 7.9 inches) and weighing 6.5 kg, it is the largest soft-shell egg ever discovered and the second-largest egg of any known animal. Although the elephant bird egg is slightly larger, its eggshell is roughly five times thicker. University of Texas at Austin paleontologist Lucas Legendre and his colleagues from the United States and Chile think that Antarcticoolithus bradyi was laid by a...

A team of paleontologists from the United States, Canada and Argentina has analyzed the fossilized eggs of two different non-avian dinosaurs, Protoceratops and Mussaurus, and found that the eggs resembled those of turtles in their microstructure, composition, and mechanical properties. They've also found that hard-shelled eggs evolved at least three times independently in the dinosaur family tree. For many years there was scant fossil evidence of dinosaur eggs, and all known examples were characterized by thick, calcified shells -- leading paleontologists to speculate that all dinosaur eggs were hard-shelled, like those of modern crocodiles and birds. "The assumption has always...

Researchers surveyed more than 2,000 dinosaur bones from the Jurassic Mygatt-Moore Quarry, a 152-million-year-old fossil deposit in western Colorado, looking for bite marks. They found more than they were expecting. Big theropod dinosaurs such as Allosaurus and Ceratosaurus ate pretty much everything - including each other... There were theropod bites on the large-bodied sauropods, whose gigantic bones dominate the assemblage, bites on the heavily armored Mymoorapelta, and lots of bites on theropods too, especially the common remains of Allosaurus. There were hundreds of them, in frequencies far above the norm for dinosaur-dominated fossil sites. Some were on meaty bones like...

Paleontologists have uncovered the remains of megaraptor that lived 70 million years ago, making it one of the last carnivorous dinosaur to roam the Earth. Discovered in Argentina, the team found vertebrae, ribs and part of what would have been the dinosaur's chest and shoulder girdle. After a further analysis, they determined the creature was approximately 33 feet in length -the largest megaraptor found to date. Unlike the Tyrannosaurus rex, this lethal dinosaur had extremely long, muscular arms with massive claws at the end that were used to attack prey.

A new species of tyrannosaur that stalked North America around 80 million years ago has been discovered by scientists in Canada. The dinosaur lived in the late Cretaceous Period, making it the oldest known tyrannosaur from North America. Another species of tyrannosaur, a Daspletosaurus, was found in Canada in 1970, a study says. Researchers say the new discovery has given them insights into the evolution of tyrannosaurs. Standing roughly 8ft (2.4m) tall, the predator would have cut an intimidating figure. Like its tyrannosaur relatives, the carnivorous dinosaur had a long, deep snout, bumps on its skull and large steak-knife-like teeth...

A new study published in Science Advances on Thursday has shed light on the life of ancient legged snakes. The Biblical story of the forbidden fruit – which discusses how the snake persuaded Eve to taste it, and howshe and Adam, who also ate from it, were subsequently banned from the Garden of Eden by God – is probably one of the most well-known narratives in the history of humankind. As described in Genesis, the snake also received divine punishment. “You will crawl on your belly and eat dirt all the days of your life,” God tells the serpent, implying...

Abundant dinosaur footprints in Alaska reveal that high-latitude hadrosaurs preferred tidally influenced habitats... Dinosaur fossils are well-known from Alaska, most famously from areas like Denali National Park and the North Slope, but there are very few records of dinosaurs from the Alaskan Peninsula in the southwest part of the state. In this study, Fiorillo and colleagues document abundant dinosaur trackways from Aniakchak National Monument, around 670km southwest of Anchorage. The trackways were preserved in the Chignik Formation, a series of coastal sediment deposits dating back to the Late Cretaceous Period around 66 million years ago. Survey work from 2001-2002 and...

Roberts...Wenchan Zhao, Francisco Garcia-Oscos and Daniel Dinh, used "optogenetic manipulation"—where light is used to monitor and control brain activity—to guide the learning of songs. They controlled the interactions between two regions of the brain in order to create memories of syllables of a song—the length of a note corresponded to the length of light exposure. As a result, they guided the learning of the zebra finch with these implanted memories. Roberts said they did not implant the song—just the length of the syllables. This is just one pathway involved in vocalizations. If they can uncover the other circuits that control...

Deep-Sea Dinosaur Fossil Buries Evolution Tim Clarey, Ph.D., and James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. Aug. 1, 2019 Oil and gas explorations have found sedimentary deposits so massive and so far offshore that secular science has no satisfactory explanation for their occurrence.1 Marine rock exposures have also revealed numerous land fossils washed great distances out to sea.2,3 Drilling off the coast of Norway has even pulled up a core containing dinosaur bone.4 Although these discoveries baffle uniformitarian scientists, they are not an issue for Flood geologists.

Researchers have found the fossilized remains of a new species of lizard inside the stomach of a small flying dinosaur known as a microraptor. Known as Indrasaurus wangi (after an ancient Hindu legend), the lizard was found almost entirely complete, SWNS reports. The lizard was swallowed whole, head first, by the microraptor, a crucial clue that provides new information into the eating habit of the winged dinosaur. "The new lizard had teeth unlike any other previously known from the Jehol Biota, thus expanding the diversity of this clade and possibly suggesting a unique diet for this new species," according to...

Inside a Crimean cave was a gigantic ancient mystery just waiting to be uncovered: a bird so large that it weighed nearly as much as an adult polar bear. Giant birds once roamed Madagascar, New Zealand and Australia. The latest fossil find, an intriguing fossilized femur, was recently found in Taurida Cave on the northern coast of the Black Sea. It was discovered along with other fossils, including bison bones, that helped researchers date the now-extinct giant bird to between 1.5 million and 2 million years ago. When the first early human ancestors arrived in Europe, they might have encountered...

There's room for all types in a newly described fossil that shows 259 baby fish swimming together in a school, approximately 50 million years ago. According to the authors of a new study published Wednesday (May 29) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, this ex-school may be the earliest known fossil evidence that prehistoric fish swam in unison, just as modern fish do today. A team of Arizona researchers stumbled upon this remarkable rock during a visit to the Oishi Fossils Gallery of Mizuta Memorial Museum in Japan. Working with the museum, the researchers determined that the...

Researcher Lilia Kobeleva of the Novosibirsk Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography and colleagues unearthed the finds at the Ust-Tartas archaeological site in the Novosibirsk region of Siberia. 'The beaks were assembled at the back of the skull, along the neck, as if it was a collar that protected the owner when he lived here,' Ms Kobeleva told the Siberian Times. Alternatively, the beaks — of which there are estimated to be between around 30 and 50 — may have been part of a ritual costume, or an elaborate headdress or piece of armour. The beaks will take months to painstakingly...

The large, flightless birds, with dagger-like claws, are considered the world’s most dangerous. “He was doing what he loved,” she said, adding that she did not want to talk anymore. "The cassowary can slice open any predator or potential threat with a single swift kick. Powerful legs help the cassowary run up to 31 miles per hour (50 kilometers per hour) through the dense forest underbrush.” “It looks like it was accidental. My understanding is that the gentleman was in the vicinity of the bird and at some point fell. When he fell, he was attacked,”