SCIENCE MAGAZINE - Some of Ian Hughes’s earliest memories are of playing in the dust and digging holes while his mom and her colleagues searched for fossils in South Australia. His mother, University of California, Riverside, paleoecologist Mary Droser, was searching for fossilized remnants of animals from the Ediacaran era, stretching from approximately 635 million...
INTERESTING ENGINEERING - Over 500 million years ago, the ancestors of a diverse group of animals known as Ecdysozoans existed. This group includes various species of insects, arachnids, and nematode worms. For a long time, the group’s early history was a blank page until now. A team of researchers has identified the earliest known ecdysozoan...
LIVE SCIENCE - The earliest known animal to show evidence of an asymmetrical body lived over half a billion years ago in what is now the Australian outback, a new study reports. The 555 million-year-old creature, dubbed Quaestio simpsonorum in a study published Sept. 3 in the journal Evolution and Development, was able to move...
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - In the mid-20th century, geologist Reg Sprigg made a stunning discovery in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges. Under the searing outback sun, he unearthed delicate impressions made by animals that lived some 550 million years ago—the missing piece in our understanding of evolution that had long eluded naturalist Charles Darwin. Called the Ediacaran...
Four UC Riverside faculty members were honored by the Graduate Division and Academic Senate with 2019-20 Senate Faculty Awards (three of them CNAS faculty), announced in a letter on June 16. Kate Sweeny, a professor of psychology; and Flip Tanedo, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy; both received the Commitment to Graduate Diversity Award...
CNN - Evidence of a worm-like creature about the size of a grain of rice has been uncovered in South Australia, and researchers believe it is the oldest ancestor on the family tree that includes humans and most animals. The creature lived 555 million years ago. "We thought these animals should have existed during this...
