'Breathtaking' Mummy Coffin Covers Seized in Israel

Two decorated covers of coffins that once contained mummies have been seized by Israeli authorities, authenticated and dated to thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt.

Ancient Human Had Feet Like an Ape [Video]

A fossil discovered in Ethiopia suggests that humans' prehistoric relatives may have lived in the trees for a million years longer than was previously thought.

Animals through the Ages: The Art of Charles R. Knight [Slide Show]

Charles R. Knight (1874 – 1953) is best known for his arresting paintings of dinosaurs and other long-vanished beasts. In the April issue of Scientific American, anthropologist and science historian Richard Milner--author of Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time --explores the experiences that shaped Knight as an artist and the influence his work had on science and popular culture. This slide show presents a selection of images from the book depicting both living animals and extinct ones.

First of Our Kind: Could Australopithecus sediba Be Our Long Lost Ancestor? (preview)

Sometime between three million and two million years ago, perhaps on a primeval sa­vanna in Africa, our ancestors became recognizably human. For more than a million years their australopithecine predecessors--Lucy and her kind, who walked upright like us yet still possessed the stubby legs, tree-climbing hands and small brains of their ape fore­bears--­had thrived in and around the continent’s forests and woodlands. But their world was changing. Shifting climate favored the spread of open grasslands, and the early australopithecines gave rise to new lineages. One of these offshoots evolved long legs, toolmaking hands and an enormous brain. This was our genus, Homo , the primate that would rule the planet.

Field Notes: A Visit to an Early Human Death Trap [Videos and Slide Show]

In late November 2011 I went to Johannesburg, South Africa, to meet the newest member of the human family, a nearly two million–year-old creature dubbed Australopithecus sediba. First announced in 2010, its fossilized bones have caused quite a commotion in paleoanthropological circles--and with good reason. They are some of the most complete early hominins (the group that includes modern humans and their extinct relatives) ever found, and they exhibit a combination of apelike and humanlike traits that no one would have predicted. Think ape arm with human hand, ape heelbone adjoining human anklebone. In the cover story of the April issue , I describe the unexpected discovery of the fossils and explore the latest thinking on where Australopithecus sediba fits in our family tree. Paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, who found the fossils, thinks A. sediba could be the ancestor of our genus, Homo; other scientists disagree. Here's a short video of Berger talking about one of the two most complete skeletons from the site. The story continues below it.

Worm Discovery Illuminates How Our Brains Might Have Evolved

Our earliest invertebrate ancestors did not have brains. Yet, over hundreds of millions of years, we and other vertebrates have developed amazingly complicated mental machinery. "It must have evolutionary roots somewhere, but where?" wrote Henry Gee, an editor at Nature, in an essay published in the journal's March 15 issue. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

Jawless Vertebrate Had World's Sharpest Teeth

From Nature magazine

Illustrating the Lost Continent

We are continually trying to illuminate things from the past, present and future. For this feature, we needed to depict rarely illustrated dinosaur species. We turned to James Gurney because he is adept at constructing lost worlds. Here is a short "how-to" lesson on how he went about re-creating long-extinct dinosaurs, making them come to life on our pages.

Dinosaurs of the Lost Continent (preview)

On a cool September morning in 2010 my crew and I began our daily descent from camp back into deep time, walking single file down a steep, knife-edge ridge of sandstone and mudstone in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Each of us carried water, a field notebook, lunch, a rock hammer and other hand tools. Heavier tools and materials--rock saws, picks, shovels, bags of plaster and swaths of burlap--awaited us half a mile away at the dig site. Even from the hilltop we could easily see the plaster jackets down in the quarry--alabaster beacons in a wilderness of arid, gray-striped badlands. Some of the irregular lumps were not much bigger than a loaf of bread. Others spanned 10 feet and tipped the scales at more than a ton. All contained the bony remains of animals that coexisted here 76 million years ago.

The Science and Art of Neandertal Teeth [Slide Show]

Of all the human ancestors represented in the fossil record, Neandertals are the best known. A significant proportion of what scientists have learned about the Neandertals is based on a set of remains that the Croatian paleontologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger recovered between 1899 and 1905 from a rock shelter in the town of Krapina, some 60 kilometers north of Zagreb. The Krapina sample dates to between 120,000 and 130,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch, and includes multiple representatives of nearly every bone and tooth of the body.

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Oldest New World Cave Art Discovered

Cave painting connects us with our prehistoric artist ancestors. But there's a dearth of such illustration in the Americas. Now a cave in Brazil has been found to house the oldest New World image known. 

A Visual History of Ancient Miniature Horses [Slide Show]

New research suggests that one of the earliest horses started out small--then got even smaller. As temperatures rose 55 million years ago during the ancient Eocene epoch, a North American horse species shrank from the size of a small dog to that of a house cat.

First Horses Shrunk by Warming Climate

The first horses in North America would not have been able to hold their own in the Triple Crown . At just about 5.6 kilograms the Sifrhippus sandrae hoofed onto the scene some 56 million years ago about the size of a small dog.

Fossilized, 'Pompeii' Forest Discovered Under Ash

About 300 million years ago, volcanic ash buried a tropical forest located in what is now Inner Mongolia, much like it did the ancient Roman city of Pompeii.

Raising the Dead: New Species of Life Resurrected from Ancient Andean Tomb

QUITO, ECUADOR--Long before the Spanish conquered the Incas in 1533, and centuries before the Incas inhabited this area, the present-day site of Quito International Airport was a marshy lake surrounded by Indian settlements--the Quitus on one shore and the Ipias on the other. Between A.D. 200 and 800 these cultures prospered here, fishing the lake, growing corn, beans and potatoes in the fertile soil, and fermenting an alcoholic drink-- chicha --made of a watery corn broth.

Cricket Fossil Reveals Ancient Song

Crickets make a big contribution to the sounds of a summer night. And they’ve been doing so for some 165 million years. Now paleontologists have reconstructed the song of a long-extinct bushcricket--based on its remains.

Swept from Africa to the Amazon (preview)

The Bodele depression at the southern edge of the Sahara is a fearsome, forsaken place. Winds howl through the nearby Tebesti Mountains and Ennedi Plateau, picking up speed as they funnel into a parched wasteland nearly the size of California. Once there was a massive freshwater lake here. Now the lake is a shrunken puddle of its former self. Across most of the landscape, there is nothing.

Readers Respond to "Toxins All Around Us" and Other Articles

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