Word: extinction
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While Churchill's research may have shed more light on the cause of Shanidar 3's death, the reasons for his species' fate remain a mystery. Some scientists believe that Neanderthals went extinct after a particularly volatile period of climate change shrank their arboreal hunting grounds. Others suggest they may have interbred with humans. A newer theory focuses on a violent end at the hands of Homo sapiens. Earlier this year, Fernando Rozzi, an anthropologist at Paris's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, found a Neanderthal jawbone that had been butchered in precisely the same way that humans...
...Despite the fact that a paleontologist would have fits over the various licenses co-directors Carlos Saldanha and Mike Thurmeier take with the dinosaur world ("I thought these guys were extinct," Ellie says, echoing our confusion), the movie does improve once it gets into the lush underground. That's largely because of the introduction of a moderately entertaining character named Buck (Simon Pegg), an eye-patch-wearing weasel who lives for the thrill of a dinosaur hunt. He's wisecracking, swashbuckling and, even with a pelt, harks back to Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow...
Finarelli and Flynn did not study as broad a collection of animals as the authors of the earlier paper. They studied just one order, the carnivores, but they did so in depth. Sampling both living terrestrial carnivores and the fossils of extinct ones, they analyzed overall brain volume relative to body mass in fully 289 species. They also factored in what is known (or, in the case of fossils, theorized) about each species' social behavior. What they got was a surprising mix of findings. (See pictures of 10 species near extinction...
...growing larger over time, some fluctuating up and down, some remaining relatively steady, some actually growing smaller. Most of the larger members of the feliform suborder - which includes large cats as well as hyenas and mongooses - pretty much stuck with the brain size they had from the start. The extinct bear-dog - a family of animals that died out 9 million years ago and were, as their name suggests, related to both bears and dogs - actually became more pea-brained over time. Common dogs, like humans, have enjoyed a comparatively recent expansion of cranial capacity...
...especially vulnerable to new diseases--the right pathogen in the right place could spread around the world in 24 hours--but it also gives us the tools to form an effective defense. "The fact that the world is one continuous village now means viruses that would have gone extinct before have the potential to take hold much more rapidly," says Nathan Wolfe, director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (GVFI). "But it also means we can create a planetary immune system...