Fossilised

Alice Winn, 30, is the author of the bestselling novel In Memoriam, about the illicit love between two public schoolboys on the western front. Already the winner of this year’s Waterstones debut fiction prize, it’s currently on the shortlist for Waterstones book of the year, announced on 30 November. Wartime historian Peter Parker recently called it “horrifyingly visceral a remarkable feel for the complicated emotions of her two protagonists... easily the most affecting novel I read this year”. Raised in Paris and…

A team of paleoanthropologists have unearthed a human fossil that is estimated to be around 1.4 million years old. The fossil was found at the Sima del Elefante archaeological site in Spain during excavations on June 30. The fossil contains fragments of a human skull and is said to be the oldest ever found in Europe, according to Atapuerca Foundation.The discovery was made at the TE7 level of the Sima del Elefante cave site. Edgar Tellez, a doctoral student at the National Center for Research on Human Evolution, first…

A recent finding at a beach in southern Spain suggests that the region may have been a nursery for an extinct species of elephant thousands of years ago. Fossilised footprints of ancient straight-tusked elephants have been found in the coastal site of Huelva, a region that the scientists call the Matalascanas Trampled Surface. Footprints and trackways have been attributed to the newborns, calves, and juveniles of the straight-tusked elephant species. Previous studies suggest that the tracks were laid down about 1,06,000…

Paleontologists have found a never-seen-before fossil of a complete baby dinosaur curled up inside its egg. The fossil showed the remarkable similarities between theropod dinosaurs and the birds they would evolve into, according to a new study. The 70-million-year-old fossilised embryo has been named “Baby Yingliang” after the museum in China which houses it. The embryo is curled up inside its 6-inch elongated eggshell. At this stage, the embryo looks like that of a modern bird, but it has small arms and claws rather than…