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Based on the many fossil finds of false gharial relatives from North Africa and Europe, palaeontologists believe that this crocodile species originated more than 50 million years ago in the western Tethys, a precursor to today's Mediterranean Sea.

When stars like our Sun use up all their fuel, they shrink to form white dwarfs. Sometimes such dead stars flare back to life in a super-hot explosion and produce a fireball of X-ray radiation.

Four species of waterfowl have been found at the Hammerschmiede site. Allgoviachen tortonica is the largest, weighing about two kilograms and reaching 70 centimeters in body length.

Egyptologists have recovered more than 18,000 inscribed sherds in ancient Athribis - the remains of vessels and jars that served as writing material some 2,000 years ago.

Drugs consist of molecules developed in the drug laboratory that bind to their target, usually a protein, and thus exert their effect. The actual duration of binding of a drug molecule to its target protein varies depending on the drug. The lifetime of the drug-target complex can play a critical role in the efficacy of a drug, as a long residence time at the target can be crucial for the drug's action in some cases.

Using an object to crack nuts is considered one of the most complex tool-using behaviors in the animal kingdom. So far, only chimpanzees, capuchins and macaques have been observed cracking nuts with such tools in the wild. In a new study, Dr. Elisa Bandini and Dr. Claudio Tennie from Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology at the University of Tübingen investigated whether other primate species such as orangutans also crack nuts with tools and how the animals can learn to do so.