Name: Gharial (Gavialis gangeticus) Where it lives: Freshwater rivers in India and Nepal What it eats: Fish. Juveniles also eat insects, frogs and crustaceans. Why it‘s awesome: The gharial is known for its long, skinny snout, which looks like it got slammed in a door. An adult male has a “ghara” at the end of […]
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain An international team of paleobiologists have found that the sinuses of ocean-dwelling relatives of modern-day crocodiles prevented them from evolving into deep divers like whales and dolphins. A new paper published today in Royal Society Open Science suggests that thalattosuchians, which lived at the time of the dinosaurs, were stopped from […]
By Ben Goldfarb Photographs by Mette Lampcov The 28th question of the hardest exam I’d taken since college was a smudged footprint pressed lightly into damp sand. The track possessed four teardrop-shaped toes and a vaguely trapezoidal heel pad; one toe, third from the left, jutted above the others, like a human’s middle finger. I […]
Over two decades ago, a team from the University of Jammu uncovered the giant fossilized skull of an extinct elephant species in India’s Kashmir Valley. The remains were uncovered along with 87 basalt stone tools used by prehistoric humans. According to a new analysis, the skull belongs to a mysterious type of elephant called Palaeoloxodon. […]
