Nature, one of the premier science journals in the world today, recently published its editors' choice of science stories for 2011.¹

Howell Thomas, senior paleontological preparator for the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was skeptical when a woman claimed that she found a fossilized whale brain in San Luis Obispo County, California, nine years ago.

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.