Major natural history museum and research institution in New York City, with collections and research spanning paleontology, anthropology, and biology.
University of Kansas researchers found that about 30 Uintatherium anceps skulls lack the clear two-group split expected if the sexes differed sharply. Run on known-sex bison, the same tests split the sexes almost perfectly, so the long-cited fossil contrast looks overstated.
Reality
Dundee's Christopher Rynn has reconstructed the face of the Punin-2 man, an Andean hunter-gatherer of 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. Local advice shaped its eyes, so the portrait adds little against the old Oceanic and archaic readings, and Rynn says ancient DNA will settle lineage.
Reality
AMNH and Oxford researchers report in Nature that 345-million-year-old Westlothiana had gills and a primitive skull. That takes away a fossil researchers have long used to date the origin of the group that includes reptiles, birds and mammals.
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Researchers describing Tamirkhan balcarceli in Nature place zhelestids, long argued to be early placental relatives, among shrew-like zalambdalestoids. The Gobi skeleton suggests teeth alone misled the group's classification for nearly 40 years.
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Squid fossils from the Western Interior Seaway push the group's known Cretaceous range to the other side of the globe, about a million years before the asteroid impact that has long been credited with spreading them.
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