“Zuul’s back and flanks are covered in various spikes and bony structures called osteoderms. Just as [Dr. Victoria] Arbour predicted, there is evidence of broken and injured osteoderms on both sides of the flanks, some of which appear to have healed.”
“The fact that Tebo 1 apparently didn’t face serious infection suggests that whoever performed the amputation understood how to keep the wound, the surgical tools, and their hands clean and understood that they needed to do so (which puts 31,000-year-old hunter-gatherers ahead of European and American surgeons just a century ago).”
“[A]dding soft tissue pads into the models substantially reduced the overall stress and strain on the pedal bones across all five species, similar to the cushioning pads of today’s elephants and rhinoceroses.”
“Sauropods got considerably more massive than even the biggest harvesters — they may have approached 80,000 kg. Their weight was spread across only four limbs, with footprints roughly comparable to those of modern tires (harvesters, in contrast, often have six tires).”
“The pellets are filled with fish scales that match a type of ray-finned fish found in that same location. The authors determined that these were gastric pellets rather than coprolites due to their shape and the location in which they were found in association with the pterosaurs.”
“The findings suggest that some of the most important members of our gastrointestinal menagerie—the ‘keystone taxa,’ as Candela and his colleagues put it—have been with us even longer than modern humans have existed.”
“The lone teenager carrying the toddler cut across that route at a right angle. At least three times, mammoths crossed the teenager’s trail, obscuring the small human footprints with their own massive feet. The teenager stepped in some of those fresh mammoth tracks on their way back south-southeast.”
“Flint-knapping in bed is probably an even worse idea than eating crackers in bed, but it’s a delightfully human thing to find traces of. Grains of red and orange ocher also mingled with the bedding layers, and Wadley and her colleagues say the grains had probably rubbed off from someone’s body art.”
“Grotte de Cussac [is] the only site from this period where people buried their dead deep in the interior of a cave (or in a bear nest), mingled the bones of multiple people, or removed skulls from the dead.”
“The micro-structural details discovered in the Koonwarra fossils help researchers understand how Cretaceous dinosaurs and birds might have used these early feathers to survive polar conditions.”
“The children seem to have scooped up clay-rich mud from the floor and smeared it on a stalagmite against the far wall, then drew curved, sinuous shapes in the wet clay with their fingers. Today, visitors to the cave can see those fluted finger-tracks, which clearly mark the heights of the three young children.”
“[The flood] had to happen quickly enough that the iridium layer hadn’t been laid down yet. It also had to take place before the heavier material—the shocked minerals and glasses—had fallen out of the sky. This creates a likely window of between 15 minutes and two hours after the [Chicxulub] impact.”
“Madgwick and his colleagues found strontium isotope ratios representing every major geological area in Britain, and oxygen and carbon isotope ratios were also all over the map, suggesting that the pigs who ended up at the four sites had been reared in diverse landscapes.”