We evolved, thank god

the proponents of creationism are reeling. Science has finally landed a vital clue that will help it demolish the argument that the theory of evolution cannot be valid, because it has not been able to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts. In the first week of April, palaeontologists reported the discovery of the fossil of an animal that had probably planted the first feet on land, literally.

This lady reveals our past

a recent discovery of fragments of fossilised bones from the Narmada basin has once again brought to the fore the question of the antiquity of the first humans on the Indian subcontinent. Anek Ram Sankhyan, a senior anthropologist with the Kolkata-based Anthropological Survey of India (asi), had unearthed collarbones and a lower rib from Hathnora, a Madhya Pradesh village located in the Narmada valley in 1998.

The first upright man

An important find at Gona in Ethiopia's Afar region, about 500 kilometres from Addis Ababa, is likely to fill a major gap in the story of human evolution.

Bytes

marine boom: An unprecedented census of marine life is reporting three new fish species a week on an average. In the first interim report of the census, an international team of scientists predicts that as many as 5,000 unknown fish species may be lurking in the waters. By the time they are done in 2010, the scientists may have found more than two million new species. So far, in two years they have found 15,304 species of fish and 214,696 species of other marine creatures.

Leviathan mystery

A 40-foot blob of slimy flesh that was washed up on the shores of a beach in Chile has confounded scientists who are trying to identify its origins. Some say it could be a rare giant octopus or squid while others believe it to be discarded blubber from a whale that has died of old age.

Dinosaurs with wings

The 'birds evolved from dinosaurs' theory has received a further shot in the arm. Scientists in China have discovered the fossilised remains of a dinosaur with four feathered wings. The dinosaur, a Microraptor, was about 90 centimetres long and lived about 130 million years ago, say scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology in Beijing. The dinosaur probably used the wings for gliding rather than flying, they speculate.

Found at last

remains of Neanderthal human skeletons and their tools have been recently found in Germany's Neander valley. The discovery was made by paleontologist Fred Smith of the Chicago-based Loyola University and his colleagues. The remains were earlier dug up in 1856 from a valley cave by quarry workers. But the workers only kept the larger bones, and threw the smaller ones back.

Tracing the roots

A seven-million-year-old nearly complete skull of the earliest human ancestor yet found was unearthed by anthropologists in the desert of northern Chad. The discovery has set back the origin of human race by one million years. As the attempt offers the first opportunity to study a human fossil from the time when humans and apes descended from a common ancestor, scientists are terming it as a major breakthrough in the study of human prehistory.

From the realms of past

scientists have discovered the fossilised remains of a marine animal, perhaps a sponge or coral, which they say lived nearly 550 million years ago.

Bacteria fossils or mere rock?

A team of British scientists analysed what has generally been accepted as the world's oldest fossils of bacteria, embedded in 3.5-billion-year-old rocks from western Australia, and they concluded that the rocks had never been more than non-living rocks. "None of the structures we see there we would interpret as fossils," said Martin D Brasier, a geobiologist at UK-based Oxford University and the lead author of the study. Rather, he said, the structures are merely tiny flaws in the rock, mineral filaments that formed around small crystals of silica.