Home

On:

One of the frustrating aspects that paleontologists face when studying dinosaur fossils is the odd lack of sexual dimorphism in the ancient creatures — being able to tell the difference between male and female individuals based on their physical features. However, one method of telling whether an individual specimen is a female or not has been uncovered, with the confirmation of a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that came from a pregnant female.

"This analysis allows us to determine the gender of this fossil, and gives us a window into the evolution of egg laying in modern birds," says the study’s lead researcher, North Carolina State University evolutionary biologist Mary Schweitzer.
read more

On:

Recent DNA testing has been conducted on a set of ancient elongated Peruvian skulls that have baffled researchers for decades, due to their unusual shape and size. While the DNA testing is not complete, the results seem to indicate that the individuals they originally belonged to were not human.
read more

On:

It has been generally accepted in many areas of the scientific community that the Shroud of Turin was created in Italy and is of European origin, but new DNA evidence shows that it was in areas that the historical record has always suggested.

The Shroud has recently had samples of particles taken from the artifact undergo DNA testing, to determine what peoples and plants were represented by the debris that have been deposited on it over the centuries.

read more

On:

Everywhere we go, we leave little traces of ourselves behind. The strand of hair, the wad of gum, the cigarette butt, nail clipping, or puddle of spittle. And all of these negligible bits and pieces that we so casually or unknowingly discard, contain our genetic information.

Doctoral student Heather Dewey-Hagborg, who is completing her degree in electronic art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, wanted to find out just how much of ourselves we are potentially revealing through this personal debris. So she began collecting these nasty little leave-behinds, and found that, “the more I walked around the city, the more I saw these genetic artifacts everywhere I looked.”
read more