Archaeology News Online

Scientists from the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the Philip J Currie Dinosaur Museum have identified and named a new species of dinosaur in honour of renowned Canadian palaeontologist Dr. Philip J. Currie. Albertavenator curriei, meaning "Currie's Alberta hunter." It stalked Alberta, Canada, about 71 million years ago in what is now the famous Red Deer River Valley. The find recognizes Currie for his decades of work on predatory dinosaurs of Alberta. Research on the new species is published in the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences . Life recreation of Albertavenator curriei [Credit: © Oliver Demuth] Palaeontologists initially thought that the bones of Albertavenator belonged to its close relative Troodon, which lived around 76 million years ago -- five million years before Albertavenator. Both dinosaurs walked on two legs, were covered in feathers, and were about the size of a person. New comparisons of bones forming the top of the head reveal that Albertavenator had a

More species of birds have accumulated in genera inhabiting climatically stable areas. This is shown by a new study from Umea University. Bar-tailed Godwit [Credit: Umea University] "The explanation may be that a stable climate makes it more likely that diverging lineages persist without going extinct or merging until speciation is completed, and stability reduces the risk for extinction in response to climatic upheavals," says Roland Jansson, researcher from Umea University who led the study. How life has evolved from simple origins into millions of species is a central question in biology that remains unsolved. Advances in genomics and bioinformatics mean we now know a lot about the relationships among species and their origins, but surprisingly little is known about which environmental conditions that allows species to multiply. In a project focusing on how climate changes in the past affects the evolution of biodiversity, researchers tried to fill this knowledge gap. They

New research published in Nature Climate Change has revealed how strengthening winds on the opposite side of Antarctica, up to 6000kms away, drive the high rate of ice melt along the West Antarctic Peninsula. The path of the Kelvin waves that interact with the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and push warmer waters under  the ice shelves of the West Antarctic Peninsula. These waves are generated by strengthening winds,  6000km away, on the opposite side of the Antarctic [Credit: Ryan Holmes/NCI] Researchers from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science found that the winds in East Antarctica can generate sea-level disturbances that propagate around the continent at almost 700 kilometers per hour via a type of ocean wave known as a Kelvin wave. When these waves encounter the steep underwater topography off the West Antarctic Peninsula they push warmer water towards the large ice shelves along the shoreline. The warm Antarctic Circumpolar Current passes quite close to the co

One night three months ago, Rosa Castro finished her dinner, opened her laptop, and uncovered a novel object that was neither planet nor star. Therapist by day and amateur astronomer by night, Castro joined the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 citizen science project when it began in February -- not knowing she would become one of four volunteers to help identify the project's first brown dwarf, formally known as WISEA J110125.95+540052.8. This illustration shows the average brown dwarf is much smaller than our sun and low mass stars and only slightly  larger than the planet Jupiter [Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center] After devoting hours to skimming online, publicly available "flipbooks" containing time-lapse images, she spotted a moving object unlike any other. The search process involves fixating on countless colorful dots, she explained. When an object is different, it simply stands out. Castro, who describes herself as extremely detail oriented, has

A simulated universe created by Swinburne University of Technology and The University of Melbourne has revealed galaxies emerging in the first billion years after the Big Bang were experiencing a recession. The density of gas in and around a simulated galaxy just over a billion years after the Big Bang. New gas  is arriving at too great a rate for the galaxy to convert it into stars and the gas piles up  [Credit: Swinburne University of Technology] It has long been imagined that the first galaxies formed after the Big Bang were rapidly growing, turning huge clouds of pristine gas into stars at rates thousands of times greater than what we see in the Milky Way today. However, new modelling inspired by economics theory has instead revealed the galaxies weren’t forming as fast as they could have. Swinburne astronomer Associate Professor Alan Duffy created supercomputer simulations of the early Universe treating the complex forming galaxies as a simple economical model with raw materials a

In 1986, a long cist burial was dug up in Bridge of Tilt near Blair Atholl, where excavators discovered the skeleton of a man in his forties. Analysis at the time found the man was used to hard work, and lived around 340 to 615 AD, making this one of the earliest Pictish graves ever discovered. The digitally re-created Pictish man [Credit: GUARD Archaeology] Now, GUARD Archaeology in Glasgow and forensic artist Hayley Fisher have managed to digitally recreate the face of the Bridge of Tilt Pict which is now on display at Perth Museum and Art Gallery as part of their Picts and Pixels exhibition. Bob Will, the archaeologist leading this project, said: “The actual burial was found in the 1980s and a certain amount of work was done then. But various members of the local community and groups wanted to do more, so they got in touch to take the project forward and one thing they wanted was a facial reconstruction. That is what got the ball rolling on that one. “We then approached Historic Env

Ancient stone tombs, some dating back more than 4,000 years, have been uncovered by archaeologists working in Jordan's Black Desert. The burial sites were discovered in the Jebel Qurma region by a team of Dutch researchers. A giant cairn which dates back to the second or third century AD  [Credit: Jebel Qurma Archaeological Landscape Project] The region is so desolate that one early explorer described it as a land of 'Dead Fire'. The discovery of the burials could help to shed light on the history of human occupation of the area over the course of millennia, as well as the conditions they faced. Though many people once lived in Jebel Qurma, its climate is now inhospitable, and very few people live there. 'Except for a short period in the spring, the whole of this country looks like a dead fire — nothing but cold ashes,' wrote Group Capt. Lionel Rees, an officer in the British Royal Air Force, in an article he published in 1929 in the journal Antiquity . This enclos