An Ignoble Experiment: Bizarre, primeval sharklike fish is unlike any vertebrate ever discovered

2022/10/03

Bizarre, primeval sharklike fish is unlike any vertebrate ever discovered

Created for ignoble.experiment@arconati.us | Web Version

October 3, 2022

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Nobel prize in medicine awarded to geneticist who sequenced Neanderthal genome

(Frank Vinken/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft)

The 2022 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine has been awarded to a Swedish geneticist who traced the evolution of modern day humans from the DNA of our close extinct relatives.

Svante Pääbo, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and one of the founders of the field of paleogenomics, is set to receive the 10 million Swedish krona ($900,500) prize for his pioneering work on the evolution of hominins, relatives of humans more closely related to us than chimpanzees, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm announced Monday (Oct. 3).

Full Story: Live Science (10/3)

History & Archaeology

7,000-year-old mass grave in Slovakia may hold human sacrifice victims

(Martin Furholt)

Archaeologists investigating an early Neolithic settlement in Slovakia have discovered the battered remains of about 35 people, many of them teenagers, who appear to have been decapitated and then thrown into a ditch almost 7,000 years ago.

The location of the grisly find this summer and the positions of the skeletons suggest the victims were dumped there on purpose, possibly as human sacrifices intended to magically strengthen a defensive wall built above the ditch, according to the researchers.

Full Story: Live Science (10/3)

Buried treasure of 44 Byzantine gold coins found in nature reserve in Israel

(Dafna Gazit/Antiquities Authority)

Excavators in Israel have discovered a trove of 44 Byzantine gold coins and other valuables.

Coins from the hoard were minted by the Byzantine Empire during the reign of Emperor Phocas (A.D. 602 to 610) and Emperor Heraclius (A.D. 610 to 641). All of the pieces of money were gold solidus coins, which were common currency during the Byzantine era (circa A.D. 330 to 1453). Experts from the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) dated the latest coins in the cache to the time of the Muslim conquest of Byzantine Palestine, which occurred in A.D. 635, according to a statement.

Full Story: Live Science (10/3)

Life's Little Mysteries

What's the fastest airborne animal?

(Photo by John Blanding/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

The cheetah is well-known for being the fastest creature on land, but the animal kingdom is not limited to Earth's surface.

What is the fastest flying animal? And what biological features enable its speed?

Full Story: Live Science (10/1)

Curious Creatures

Bizarre, primeval sharklike fish is unlike any vertebrate ever discovered

(IVPP/Chinese Academy of Sciences)

Researchers in China have uncovered the remains of a 439 million-year-old shark-like fish with unusual features that "set it apart from any known vertebrate," or animal with a backbone. The bizarre creature, which is covered in spines and "bony armor," is the oldest undisputed jawed vertebrate ever discovered, a new study reports.

Scientists discovered the remains of the newly identified, extinct species at the Rongxi Formation, a renowned fossil site in Guizhou province, in southern China. The researchers named the species Fanjingshania renovata, after a nearby mountain known as Fanjingshan.

Full Story: Live Science (10/3)