news 2023

Today, there exist only three elephant species, in Africa and Asia. Yet the diversity of proboscidean species and their distribution was significantly greater in the Earth's past. Researchers from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment, working at the Hammerschmiede site in southern Germany, have now described new fossils of early proboscidean species.

Research team led by Göttingen University describe early occurrence of irregular sea urchins in the depths of the oceans Right at the bottom of the deep sea, the first very simple forms of life on earth probably emerged a long time ago. Today, the deep sea is known for its bizarre fauna. Intensive research is being conducted into how the number of species living on the sea floor have changed in the meantime.

With a shell length of about 100 millimeters, the land-dwelling areolate flat-shelled turtle (Homopus areolatus) is one of today's smallest turtle species. The record at the other end of the scale is held by the leatherback turtle (Dermochelys coriacea), which is common in tropical and subtropical seas and can reach up to two meters in length.

Human history in one click: For the first time, numerous sites relating to the early history of mankind from 3 million to 20,000 years ago can be accessed in a large-scale database. Scientists from the research center ROCEEH ("The Role of Culture in Early Expansions of Humans") have compiled information on 2,400 prehistoric sites and 24,000 assemblages from more than 100 ancient cultures.

University of Tübingen paleontologists Dr. Márton Rabi and Gustavo Darlim, working with Chulalongkorn University and Department of Mineral Resources of Thailand, have demonstrated that an almost completely fossilized alligator skull found in Thailand belongs to a previously unknown species. The fossil was discovered in 2005 and is at most 230,000 years old.

International research team sheds light on puberty of extinct vertebrates some 240 million years ago Fossil skeletons have long fascinated researchers as a window to prehistory. But so far, little is known about details of sexual development in extinct creatures. An international team of researchers from China, Germany and Japan, with significant participation from the University of Bonn, reports on the puberty of Keichousaurus in the journal Current Biology.

Wild animals entered into diverse relationships with humans long before the first settlements were established in the Neolithic period around 10,000 years ago. An international study by researchers from the Universities of Tübingen, Helsinki and Aarhus presents new evidence that ravens helped themselves to people's scraps and picked over mammoth carcasses left by human hunters during the Pavlovian culture more than 30,000 years ago in what is now Moravia in the Czech Republic.

A 3D model of a 407-million-year-old plant fossil has overturned thinking on the evolution of leaves / "Science" publication A 3D model of a 407-million-year-old plant fossil has overturned thinking on the evolution of leaves. The research has also led to fresh insights about spectacular patterns found in plants.

Schöningen/Tübingen, 05/12/2023. In a study published today in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, an international research team led by scientists from the University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment presents the earliest human footprints known from Germany.

Plant fossils from Egypt shed light on the evolutionary history of rainforests An international team of researchers led by first author Dr. Clément Coiffard of Freie Universität Berlin and Senckenberg scientist Dieter Uhl has taken a close look at the evolutionary history of tropical rainforests.

Study led by the University of Bonn: Aetosaur find involves juveniles Aetosaurs had a small head and a crocodile-like body. The land dwellers were up to six meters long and widely distributed geographically. They died out about 204 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic. In Kaltental near Stuttgart, Germany, an assemblage of 24 Aetosaurus ferratus individuals, only between 20 and 82 centimeters long, was discovered in 1877.

Researchers gain insight into life in an ancient sea With a broken jaw on the prowl - that seems almost impossible. But researchers have discovered an approximately 245-million-year-old nothosaur fossil on which the injury had healed. The international team, with participation from the University of Bonn, examined other marine reptile bone anomalies from a site near the town of Winterswijk in the Netherlands.

Ancient fossils reveal the evolutionary history of ossification in the spine of land vertebrates A study conducted by researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin revealed the evolution of ossification patterns in the backbones of four-legged vertebrates. Antoine Verrière and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the patterns of how the bones in the vertebral column formed in the ancestor to all land vertebrates based on a large dataset of modern and fossil vertebrates with the inclusion of rare new data from the 300 Ma old reptile Mesosaurus tenuidens.