Salamanders are slick-skinned amphibians whose diets shift as they mature. Some live their entire lives in water, and others spend their adult lives on land. Those inhabiting water eat plankton when young and then various insects and other small arthropods called "clam shrimp" when older.

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