The 2013 discovery of the largest collection of hominid fossils ever found is rewriting the origin of complex behaviours we thought were uniquely human, says a renowned paleoanthropologist. The fossilized bones belonged to an entirely new species of ancient human relatives called, Homo naledi, which lived in South Africa several hundred thousand years ago when the first Homo … Read more
Not far from the bank of Wapiti River, just 11 kilometres from Grande Prairie, there’s a paleontological goldmine: an ancient riverbed that contains fragments of skeletons of hundreds, possibly thousands, of animals from the late Cretaceous period, some 70 million years ago. Discovered in 2014, the bonebed is known as a DC site, or, more formally, Wapiti Unit 3. … Read more
There’s something Aristotle said in his Poetics about the effective use of metaphor. Boiling it down, he observed that while coming up with metaphors takes genius, overstuffing your story with beautiful — but confusing — symbols doesn’t leave you with a timeless piece of art. Instead, you end up with “nothing but riddles or gibberish.” Apparently, … Read more
Doug Olson heard a loud thud on his roof while folding laundry in October last year. When he went out to investigate the cause of the sound, he didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. But earlier this spring, while cleaning out his rain gutters on the roof of his Mill Woods home, Olson discovered a small … Read more
Nun cho ga, the baby wooly mammoth whose extraordinarily preserved remains caused a sensation after they were dug up by a miner near Dawson City, Yukon, last year, could soon be heading to Ottawa — at least for a period. The rare specimen — believed to be about 30,000 to 35,000 years old — has been stored in a … Read more
Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are killed annually by malaria and other diseases spread through the bite of mosquitoes, insects that date back to the age of dinosaurs. All of these bites are inflicted by females, which possess specialized mouth anatomy that their male counterparts lack. But it hasn’t always been that way. Researchers … Read more
