1-Rabbit-Size Elephant Ancestor Found -- Oldest Known

After the dinosaurs perished, life on Earth didn't take long to bounce back, a new study suggests. 

A newfound 60-million-year-old creature called Eritherium azzouzorum—the oldest known elephant ancestor—bolsters the case that whole new orders of mammals were already around less than 6 million years after global catastrophe ended the age of reptiles some 65.5 million years ago. 

Paleontologist Emmanuel Gheerbrant discovered the rabbit-size proto-elephant's skull fragments in a basin 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Casablanca, Morocco. 

Elephant ancestors, he said, now join the likes of rodents and early primates as some of the first known mammals to walk the Earth during the Paleocene era, 65.5 to 55 million years ago (prehistoric time line).

2-Yard-long "Megapiranha" Fossil Found

Eight to ten million years ago, South America's waters harbored a toothier, three-foot (one-meter) version of today's famed, flesh-eating piranhas. 

Alberto Cione, a paleontologist at Argentina's La Plata Museum, first noticed the evidence of Megapiranha pananensis (pictured in an artist's rendering)--an upper jaw with three unusually large and pointed teeth--in his collection in the 1980s. The remains had been discovered half a century earlier in a riverside cliff in northeastern Argentina.

Despite their fearsome reputation, modern piranhas are usually no longer than a foot (30 centimeters) and only occasionally bite humans.

3-Wild Europe Exposed by Giant Photo Project

By July 2009, 66 photographers will have scoured 48 countries to document European wildlife as well as to show that Europe is more countryside than concrete, organizers say.

Many of the one hundred thousand images taken during the endeavor, which began in May 2008, will be shown in outdoor exhibitions across Europe starting in 2010.

Captured during the Wild Wonders of Europe photography project, vibrantly colored European bee-eaters flit around Hungary's Puszta, a vast region of plains and wetlands, on May 12, 2008.

An Arctic fox sits in a meadow of wild flowers in Iceland's Hornstandir Nature Reserve on July 20, 2008.

A long-legged buzzard alights on its nest in Nikopol, Bulgaria, on June 11, 2008.

An Atlantic wolffish emerges from its lair alongside a polar shrimp—which may hang around to clean the fish—off Saltsraumen, along the Norwegian coastline, on October 7, 2008.

A yearling Eurasian brown bear cub relaxes in a meadow in Kainuu, a region in northeastern Finland, on July 10, 2008.

Italy's Gargano Peninsula is home to more than 69 species of orchid (such as this one pictured on April 30, 2008), making the region "the secret Mecca of European orchid lovers," photographer Sandra Bartocha wrote on her blog.

A hoopoe holds a bug snack in its beak in Hortobágy National Park in Pusztaszer, Hungary, in May 2008.

4-Hybrid "Superpredator" Invading California Ponds

Mating between the rare California tiger salamander and the introduced barred tiger salamander has created a monster—at least for animals that dwell in the ponds of California's Salinas River Valley.

The new hybrid "superpredator" grows larger than either of its parent species, and its bigger mouth enables it to suck up a wide variety of amphibian prey, said lead study author Maureen Ryan, of the Center for Population Biology at the University of California, Davis. 

Mostly on the menu are smaller pond species, such as the Pacific chorus frog and the California newt—both of which were "dramatically reduced" in population by the hybrid in the experiments. 

Barred tiger salamanders were introduced to California in the 1940s and '50s from Texas. 

Hybrids of the invaders and native salamanders now occupy about 20 percent of the indigenous amphibian's range in the Salinas Valley. 

5-Thumb-Size Bat Found in Lava Tunnel

June 26, 2009—Caught during a steamy moment in a lava tunnel in 2006, these two apparently mating bats—members of a new species—are each no bigger than a human thumb, scientists reported June 24. 

Weighing just 0.2 ounce (5 grams), Aellen's long-fingered bat was discovered on a volcanic island in Africa's Comoros chain. DNA analysis later confirmed the bat as a unique species. 

Subsequent genetic tests revealed that the bat is also found on the west coast of the island of Madagascar, said study team member Manuel Ruedi, a curator at the Natural History Museum in Geneva, Switzerland. 

6-Lynx Kittens Signal Success in Colorado

The discovery of ten lynx kittens—including the young cat in this May 2009 picture—this spring marks the first time newborn lynx have been documented in Colorado since 2006, heartening biologists overseeing restoration of the mountain feline.

The tuft-eared cats with big, padded feet are native to Colorado, but were wiped out by the early 1970s by logging, trapping, poisoning, and development. They are listed as threatened on the U.S. endangered species list. 

Biologists had found no kittens in 2007 and 2008, possibly partly because of a drop in the number of snowshoe hares, the cats' main food sources. 

This year seven male and three female kittens have been found in five dens. 

More than 200 lynx from Alaska and Canada have been released in Colorado since 1999. Biologists don't know how many lynx are currently in the state.

7-Nut-Size Ancient Skull Explains Our Brains' Bigness?

By scanning a 54-million-year-old skull roughly the size of a walnut, scientists have created the first virtual 3-D model of an early primate brain, a new study says.

Surprisingly, the model suggests that primates (such as lemurs, monkeys, apes, and humans, among others) might have evolved larger brains as a result of the need to move quickly from tree to tree—not, as commonly assumed, to hunt for fruit or navigate within a single tree. 


The 1.5-inch-long (4-centimeter-long) skull belongs to the long-gone Ignacius graybullianus—described as a cousin of our earliest ancestors—which arose less than ten million years after the dinosaurs vanished. 

Discovered in Wyoming roughly 25 years ago, the fossil "is the most complete early primate skull known," said study co-author Jonathan Bloch, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Florida. 

Due to its completeness and age, the skull gives us the clearest idea yet what early primates were like, the researchers argue. Even so, they say more early-primate fossils are needed to test the study's conclusions. 

After taking more than 1,200 detailed X-ray images of the skull, researchers combined them to help create a 3-D model of Ignacius' brain. 

The model showed a brain just one-half to two-thirds the size of the smallest modern primate brain, the study says.