Scientists have often wondered how woolly mammoths survived and thrived in the frigid climes of the far north in Earth’s last ice age. The hemoglobin in elephant (and human) blood cannot easily transfer oxygen to other cells in the body at low temperatures.
Despite being tens of millions of years old, some beetle fossils appear almost as they did in life. Not only is their shape and structure preserved, but the actual colors of their shells, which have changed only slightly in the intervening eons.
You should all know that velociraptors weren’t really like they were portrayed in ‘Jurassic Park’. They were an awful lot smaller, they had feathers, and they probably weren’t quite so smart. But they *were* nasty predators. Or were they?
The latest issue of Science contains a paper by McKellar et al, showing a number of examples of dinosaur and early bird feathers preserved in late Cretaceous amber (about 70 million years old) from Alberta, Canada (h/t to artist Kalliope Monoyios at Symbiartic for calling to to my attention).