Blurs

Sometimes a fossil is more than the remains of a dead animal. Sometimes it is a geographical mystery.  A creature is discovered thousands of miles from where scientists expected it to be. A tropical species turns up in what was once a surprisingly cold region. A land animal appears on an island separated from the mainland by an ocean. A familiar species is found in rocks that suggest an environment completely unlike the one its living relatives inhabit. These discoveries can force scientists to reconsider ancient geography, climate and migration. But they also raise a more intriguing question: How many times have we underestimated the ability of prehistoric animals to cross the planet? The world they inhabited wasn't the world we know today. Continents moved. Seas appeared and disappeared. Land bridges formed and vanished. Ice sheets expanded. Deserts became grasslands, and forests spread across regions that are now frozen or barren. Coastlines also migrated by hundreds of kilometr...

At almost 9,000 metres above sea level, Mount Everest seems about as far from an ocean as it is possible to get.  Yet its summit rocks contain fossils of creatures that lived in an ancient sea. How can marine life that once lived near sea level end up preserved in the highest mountain on Earth? The answer takes us hundreds of millions of years into Earth's past — to a time when the Himalayas did not exist, India was somewhere else entirely, and the region around Everest was part of a warm marine environment. The Roof of the World Has Marine Fossils The upper rocks of Everest include limestone from the Qomolangma Formation, deposited during the Ordovician Period roughly 450–470 million years ago. Inside these rocks are fossils and fossil fragments from marine organisms. Among them are brachiopods, crinoids, trilobites and ostracods, along with other microscopic and shelly remains. So the popular claim that there are "seashells on Everest" isn't simply an internet myth....

The Cave Art That Could Rewrite Ireland’s Human History Ancient markings hidden inside eight Irish caves could push the story of human settlement on the island back thousands of years — and point towards a lost Ice Age landscape connecting Ireland with Wales. For thousands of years, some of Ireland's most remarkable evidence of the human past may have been sitting in darkness. Researchers working in south-west Ireland have identified rock art in eight caves that they believe dates back at least 15,000 years — potentially much earlier than the previously accepted evidence for humans on the island. If the interpretation and dating withstand further investigation, it could move the earliest known human presence in Ireland back by around 5,000 years. But the discovery raises an even bigger question: How did those people get there? A very different Ireland The Ireland these people would have known was nothing like the island we recognise today. They lived towards the end of the last Ice...

For thousands of years, fields across Britain have been hiding the remains of settlements, burial monuments, ancient boundaries and ceremonial landscapes. Most of the time, they are almost impossible to see. Then the weather changes. During prolonged periods of hot, dry weather, crops growing above buried archaeology can behave differently from plants growing over undisturbed ground. What appears to be an ordinary field from ground level can suddenly develop strange lines, circles, rectangles and geometric patterns when viewed from the air. In 2018, an exceptionally dry summer produced some of the clearest archaeological cropmarks seen in years. Historic England's aerial archaeologists took to the skies — and discovered that parts of England's prehistoric landscape were far richer than previously realised. When the landscape gives itself away The principle behind these discoveries is surprisingly simple. Archaeological remains buried beneath a field can alter the soil above the...