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

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

Chitin is a biological material found in the cuttlebones, or internal shells, of cuttlefish. It has a maximum shelf life of thousands of years, and yet researchers recently verified—using three separate techniques, multiple laboratories, and careful material handling—that samples of chitin from fossils had the same basic chemistry as modern chitin.

Many believe that fossils represent organisms that died millions of years ago. Scientific literature, however, contains dozens of well-described original soft tissues in fossils. Since laboratory tests have shown that organic tissues decay in only thousands of years, these fossils have been at the center of much heated controversy.