On January 11, Google celebrated the 374th birthday of Nicolaus Steno by featuring a colorful doodle of rock layers on its homepage.¹

The evolutionary history of certain extinct marine reptiles just got rewritten.

Researchers were able to find 126 unique proteins from a frozen wooly mammoth in the first ever "shotgun sequence" of fossil protein content.¹

Many butterflies and moths have colors that show a metallic sheen. That sheen occurs because the refracting material in their wings and bodies is spread out in layers precisely as thin as the wavelengths of the light they refract.

Workers expanding a highway in 2010 found fossils of 80 huge whales in desert sandstones in Chile, prompting questions of how they died and why they were so well preserved.