News about PaperPanda, Open Access, and Research
A Stone Age woman who lived 4,000 years ago is leaning on her walking stick and looking ahead as a spirited young boy bursts into a run, in a stunning life-size reconstruction now on display in Sweden. Although her likeness is new – it debuted last month in an exhibit about ancient people at Västernorrlands Museum … Read more
Researchers in Japan are investigating the origins of a nightmarish, 300-year-old mummified ‘mermaid‘, which has been worshipped for centuries due to its supposed medicinal properties. The haunting remains are most likely a gruesome amalgam of a monkey’s torso sewed onto a fish’s tail, potentially embellished with hair and nails from a human. Hiroshi Kinoshita, board member … Read more
Archaeologists may have just uncovered evidence for the oldest known practice of mummification. Human remains interred 8,000 years ago in the Sado Valley in Portugal, during the Mesolithic, appear to have been deliberately treated for mummification prior to burial. This is the first evidence for Mesolithic mummification in Europe. It’s also possibly the oldest … Read more
Unnerving images of a mummified shark that looks like a zombie, as well as other dead and decaying sea creatures, have been captured in eerie new footage of an abandoned aquarium. The spooky viral video was taken by a pair of “urban explorers” who broke into the unnamed aquarium in Spain. The video was … Read more
During low tide on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, a graduate student hunting for dinosaur bones looked down at the coastal rocks and made the discovery of a lifetime: the remains of the largest pterosaur on record from the Jurassic period. Since collecting the specimen in 2017 – an eventful excavation that involved cutting out … Read more
The Milky Way galaxy feasted on more galaxies in its early days than astronomers thought. The Gaia spacecraft uncovered the remains of an ancient cosmic collision in our Milky Way, revealing a previously unknown galaxy, now nicknamed “Pontus,” absorbed by the Milky Way long before our galaxy looked the way it does now. Pontus was … Read more
About 95 million years ago in what is now Australia, a massive crocodile relative clamped down with its powerful jaws on the small body of a dinosaur and gulped nearly all of it down in one mighty swallow. The crocodilian died soon after, and as it fossilized, so did the partly-digested and near-complete dinosaur … Read more
Six mummified children thought to have been sacrificed hundreds of years ago, apparently to accompany a dead nobleman to the afterlife, have been unearthed in a tomb near Lima, archaeologists reported. The tiny skeletons, wrapped tightly in cloth, were found in the grave of an important man, possibly a political figure, discovered last November … Read more
Distant X-rays may be the most direct evidence yet of the remains of a disintegrated planet colliding with the corpse of a star, a new study finds. White dwarfs are the cool, dim cores of dead stars that are left behind after average-size stars have exhausted their fuel and shed their outer layers. They are … Read more
It can be hard to find food in the central Arctic Ocean. The water is frigid and the surface is blanketed in ice, making it nearly impossible for the tiny organisms that power many marine food chains to photosynthesize. Now, researchers have unraveled how a gigantic, newly discovered sponge garden gets around the lack of … Read more