Top Archaeological Novelties Found Underwater in 2024
Surprisingly, historical landmarks can survive in water. A 2,000-year-old temple from the “Indiana Jones civilization” has been found submerged off the coast of Italy. An ancient sunken bridge in Spain shows that people inhabited the Mediterranean island nearly 6,000 years ago. A torrential downpour hit an excavation site and uncovered a 233-million-year-old dinosaur. Archaeologists have discovered underwater images of several New and Late Kingdom pharaohs in the southern Egyptian province of Aswan. Archaeologists have found a centuries-old statue of a Greek god at the bottom of a Roman sewer.
LUCA – the new universally recognized ancestor of all life on Earth
New research suggests that all life today descended from a cell that lived 4.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Earth formed. This last universal common ancestor, affectionately nicknamed LUCA by biologists, wasn’t all that different from the fairly complex bacteria that exist today — and it lived in an ecosystem teeming with other life and viruses.
Ediacaran animals are still considered the earliest multicellular animals on Earth
And paleontologists and geneticists are finding more and more evidence to support this fact. Using fossils and genetic dating, scientists have put forward very different candidates for the role of the world’s first animal. Today, animals of all shapes and sizes roam the Earth, from nearly microscopic creatures like tardigrades to 80-foot (25-meter) blue whales. These organisms emerged and developed over millions of years of evolution. But which animal was the first on the planet?
Cambrian animals add new mysteries to researchers
Jaws found in 500-million-year-old fossils. A new study by scientists at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) has concluded that O. alata was likely one of the first arthropods with lower jaws, a departure from previous research that suggested the animal may have been a filter feeder.
Matching dinosaur footprints found in Africa and South America
Tens of millions of years ago, South America and Africa were part of the same landmass, an ancient supercontinent called Gondwana. At some point, the two continents began to drift apart until only a thin strip of land remained above, holding them together. A team of scientists in a new study argues that matching dinosaur tracks found in what are now Brazil and Cameroon were left along this narrow passage 120 million years ago, before the continents split apart.
Dinosaurs could live underground
A newly discovered dinosaur may have spent part of its life underground. Paleontologists have recently uncovered a new fossilized animal — and this time, it’s a burrower. Fona herzogae, discovered in Utah by researchers and paleontologists from North Carolina State University, was a small, herbivorous dinosaur that lived during the Cenomanian period — about 100 to 66 million years ago.
Lebanon’s ‘Amber Man’ Digs Up Dinosaur-Age Treasures
Azar, who holds a joint appointment at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology in China and the Lebanese University, looks at the dirt and rocks in front of him. It doesn’t look like much – but he knows what he’s looking for. In the dirt and rocks at his feet, he spots a piece of amber no bigger than a grain of rice. Then he spots another, and another – shiny gold shards glittering in the sun.