Veículo

• Home
• Veículos
• The Archaeology News Network (Grécia)

The 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 [...]

The 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 [...]

In 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 [...]

Brazilian 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 [...]

A 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 [...]

Snakes 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 [...]

The first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record dates to 521 million years ago in the oceans of the Cambrian Period, when the continents were still inhospitable to most life forms. Few groups of animals adapted as successfully as trilobites, which were arthropods that lived on the seabed for 270 million years until the mass extinction at the end of the Permian approximately 252 million years ago. The longer ago organisms lived, the more rare are their fossils and the harder it is to [...]

Shell middens are archaeological features consisting mainly of the remains of marine animals thrown away near settlements over hundreds or thousands of years. They are the debris of human activity. In Brazil, they are known by the Tupi word sambaqui. The sambaquis were left by people who lived between 8,000 and 1,000 years ago in coastal Atlantic Forest areas, traditionally considered peripheral to South America's first food production centers in the Andes and the Amazon. A new study, [...]

The history of the peopling of the Americas has just been interpreted afresh. The largest and most comprehensive study ever conducted on the basis of fossil DNA extracted from ancient human remains found on the continent has confirmed the existence of a single ancestral population for all Amerindian ethnic groups, past and present. Over 17,000 years ago this original contingent crossed the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska and began peopling the New World. Fossil DNA shows an affinity [...]