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Life existed more than 9,000 years ago Discovery made at Little Salt Spring Little Salt Spring ranks as one of the major archaeological sites in the western hemisphere. Even though only 5 percent of the spring has been explored, divers have found artifacts dating back 12,000 years ago. NORTH PORT -- After thousands of years underwater, a handful of North Port's history resurfaced in a Ziploc bag. "They don't call it hardwood for nothin'!" said Steve Koski to John Gifford after the two emerged from the Little Salt Spring with a radiocarbon sample last week. Koski, an archaeologist at Little...

CAVE JUNCTION, Ore. - John Roth shined his flashlight on a black streak flowing through the cream-colored marble forming the walls of the Oregon Caves. The graphite line is graphic evidence of dramatic global warming that consumed so much oxygen that it nearly wiped out all life on the planet 247 million years ago, said the natural resources specialist for the Oregon Caves National Monument. "It was the biggest extinction by far of all time," he said. "Geologists and paleontologists all agree on that. ... The extinction that killed the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, that wasn't anything compared...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The oldest planet ever detected is nearly 13 billion years old and more than twice the size of Jupiter, locked in orbit around a whirling pulsar and a white dwarf, astronomers said on Thursday. Compared with the relative youth and stability of our own celestial neighborhood, where Earth and the other planets orbit a single 5-billion-year-old star in a quiet neighborhood of the Milky Way, the ancient group that holds the oldest planet has had a boisterous past, scientists said at a NASA (news - web sites) briefing. The old planet is located near the heart of...