Tag: brain
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PBS Eons: How a Mass Extinction Changed Our Brains
PBS Eons has a new episode. This one is about the evolution of the mammal brain. During one of the most pivotal moments in our evolutionary story our brains actually shrank relative to our bodies.
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500-million-year-old fossilized brains of Stanleycaris prompt a rethink of the evolution of insects and spiders
Phys.org has a story about fossilized brains…500 million year old brains. A recent paper from researchers at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada describes the fossilized brain in a species of Radiodont called Stanleycaris. The animal is related to Anomalocaris and distantly related to modern day spiders and insects. This amazing fossil was collected…
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How did birds survive the dinosaur-killing asteroid?
Live Science has a story about the survival of the birds across the K-Pg boundary. A paper in the journal Science Advances looks at brain size of a fossil birds and theorizes that was a factor that helped them survive. When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago, it triggered a…
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Reconstruction of Tyrannosaur Braincases Shows More Variation Than Previously Thought
SciTechDaily has a story about tyrannosaur skulls. Researchers in Canada and Argentina scanned the skulls to reconstruct the braincase of two well-preserved Daspletosaurs. Their research, which found more variation than expected, was published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. Among the fierce carnivores that lived during the late Cretaceous was a predator named Daspletosaurus. The massive tyrannosaur,…
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Phys.org: Giant fossil flightless bird had an enormous body but was still ‘bird-brained’
Phys.org has a story about a giant flghtless bird from Australia. The animal, Dromornis stirtoni, lived in Australia about 50,000 years ago. It stood about 3 meters high and had a weighed up to 600 kg. The description of this species was recently published in the journal Diversity. The largest flightless bird ever to live…
