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The Archaeology News Network (Grécia)
Em 2021: 0 notícias
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Study reveals impact of centuries of human activity in American tropics
Publicado em 15 setembro 2020
The devastating effects of human activity on wildlife in the American tropics over the last 500 years are revealed in a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
More than half of the species in local 'assemblages' - sets of co-existing species—of medium and large mammals living in the Neotropics of Meso and South America have died out since the region was first colonised by Europeans in the 1500s.
Researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA), in the UK, and [...]
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Oldest South American fossil lizard discovered in Brazil
Publicado em 28 julho 2020Fossil remains of a novel species of lizard that lived more than 130 million years ago have been found in the north of Minas Gerais, Brazil. It has been named Neokotus sanfranciscanus and is the oldest representative of the order Squamata ever found in South America. Squamates are the largest reptile group, comprising lizards, snakes and amphisbaenians (worm lizards). The discovery shows that scaled lizards were present on the continent at least 20 million years earlier than previously [...]ver notícia -
Solar system acquired current configuration not long after its formation
Publicado em 01 abril 2020The hypothesis that the Solar System was born from a gigantic cloud of gas and dust was first floated in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was proposed by German philosopher Immanuel Kant and developed by French mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace. It is now a consensus among astronomers. Thanks to the enormous amount of observational data, theoretical input and computational resources now available, it has been continually refined, but this is not a linear process. Nor is it [...]ver notícia -
A novel method for analyzing marine sediments contributes to paleoclimate reconstitution
Publicado em 06 novembro 2019The analysis of marine sediments has become a powerful research method in paleoclimatology. The composition of the sediments carried by rivers from the mainland to the ocean can be used as a basis for calculating variables such as temperature, precipitation and marine salinity. In the context of ongoing global climate change, the study of the past is fundamental to validating the accuracy of the climate models used to make predictions. A novel method of sediment analysis was proposed by [...]ver notícia -
Tube anemone has the largest animal mitochondrial genome ever sequenced
Publicado em 11 junho 2019The tube anemone Isarachnanthus nocturnus is only 15 cm long but has the largest mitochondrial genome of any animal sequenced to date, with 80,923 base pairs. The human mitochondrial genome (mitogenome), for example, comprises 16,569 base pairs. Tube anemones (Ceriantharia) are the focus of an article recently published in Scientific Reports describing the findings of a study led by Sérgio Nascimento Stampar, a professor in São Paulo State University's School of Sciences and [...]ver notícia -
The Cerrado Once Connected the Andes with the Atlantic Rainforest
Publicado em 17 abril 2019The tropical forests of the Andes and Brazil's Atlantic Rainforest biome are separated by almost 1,000 km of drier areas with open vegetation in the Chaco, Cerrado (Brazilian savanna), and Caatinga (Brazilian semiarid) biomes. Today, these tropical forests are not connected, but the fact that they share closely related species and lineages suggests that these biomes were connected in the past. For example, 23 rainforest bird species have been found in both the Andean and Atlantic tropical [...]ver notícia -
Astronomers find evidence of a planet with a mass almost 13 times that of Jupiter
Publicado em 08 abril 2019In the past three decades, almost 4,000 planet-like objects have been discovered orbiting isolated stars outside the Solar System (exoplanets). Beginning in 2011, it was possible to use NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to observe the first exoplanets in orbit around young binary systems of two live stars with hydrogen still burning in their core. Brazilian astronomers have now found the first evidence of the existence of an exoplanet orbiting an older or more evolved binary in which one of the [...]ver notícia -
Amoebae diversified at least 750 million years ago, far earlier than expected
Publicado em 28 fevereiro 2019Brazilian researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary history of amoebae and demonstrated that at the end of the Precambrian period, at least 750 million years ago, life on Earth was much more diverse than suggested by classic theory. The study, which was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation - FAPESP, revealed eight new ancestral lineages of Thecamoebae, the largest group in Amoebozoa. Thecamoebians are known as testates because of their hard outer carapace or [...]ver notícia -
Giant animals lived in Amazonian mega-wetland
Publicado em 25 fevereiro 2019A land of giants. This is the best definition for Lake Pebas, a mega-wetland that existed in western Amazonia during the Miocene Epoch, which lasted from 23 million to 5.3 million years ago. The Pebas Formation was the home of the largest caiman and gavialoid crocodilian ever identified, both of which were over ten meters in length, the largest turtle, whose carapace had a diameter of 3.5 meters, and rodents that were as large as present-day buffaloes. Remains of the ancient biome are [...]ver notícia -
Research explains how snakes lost their limbs
Publicado em 06 fevereiro 2019Snakes and lizards are reptiles that belong to the order Squamata. They share several traits but differ in one obvious respect: snakes do not have limbs. The two suborders diverged more than 100 million years ago. Identification of the genetic factors involved in this loss of limbs is a focus of the article "Phenotype loss is associated with widespread divergence of the gene regulatory landscape in evolution" published by Juliana Gusson Roscito and collaborators in Nature [...]ver notícia