pale blue dot
Tyrannosaurus rex (rex meaning “king” in Latin) lived throughout what is now western North America 68 to 66 million years ago, during the Upper Cretaceous period. Back then, there was a big island (an island continent) called “Laramidia” there. But, how many Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth? At the same time, and in total? Ashley …
Continue reading “How many Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth?”
One of the most enduring tropes about crocodiles is to describe them as “living fossils”. They are cold, slow-moving, and scaly, so they look like how one might picture a dinosaur. Like many clichés, there is an element of truth to this comparison. The crocodiles from 200 million years ago look surprisingly like the ones …
Continue reading “Why Crocodiles today look the same as they did 200 million years ago?”
Around 55.5 million years ago, there was a time period with more than 5°C – 8 °C warmer global average temperature than today, which named “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” (PETM). As a result, there were crocodiles and even crocodiles in the Arctic and the region was completely ice-free. Now, a new study suggests that if we …
By studying lunar craters, scientists have discovered that asteroid impacts became more frequent about 290 million years ago. So was just a matter of time for dinosaurs to become extinct.
What if the Earth’s history (our planet’s age is approximately 4.54 billion years), compressed into just one year? @YearOnEarth just did that. At midnight on the 31st of December, Chris Jennings started a little project for the incoming year: tweeting the entirety of the geological history of the Earth, compressed into one year. The result …
Continue reading “What If Earth’s History Compressed Into One Year”
It’s ironic how calling a person a “monkey” or “orangutan” is considered offensive when we all know that humans are descended from these apes. Well, sometimes it is hard to find logic in the customs and practices of our society, but if you are willing to find the path of evolution that turned monkeys into …
Continue reading “The Significance of Fossils in Revealing the Evolution on Earth”
Back in December 1990, during its flyby of Earth, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft, which studied the planet Jupiter and its moons, as well as several other Solar System bodies, pointed its instruments towards Earth, at the urging of Carl Sagan. And, it has found evidence of life on our planet. This can be a key to detecting …
Continue reading “Earth can be a model for detecting vegetation on exoplanets”
Birds (Aves or avian dinosaurs) range in size and weight from the 5 cm (2 in) and 1.6-2 grams bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) and 104-156 kg (229-344 lbs) ostrich. Here are the top 15 largest bird species in the world (by body weight). Birds are from one of six basic animal …
Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid or comet at least 10 kilometers (6 miles) in diameter impacted a few miles from the present-day town of Chicxulub in Mexico (hence it is dubbed as the “Chicxulub impactor”, the “dinosaur-killer”), at around 64,000 kilometers per hour (40,000 mph). The impact has created a crater (Chicxulub crater) …
Continue reading “Dinosaur-killer Asteroid Triggered a Global Warming which lasted 100,000 Years”
Hint: they are all space rocks. But, there are some differences. The biggest difference between an asteroid and a comet, for example, is what they are made of.
