Fossils

A rare and large Pteranodon skeleton sold at a Sotheby's auction in New York this evening for US$3,932,000, moving into the top five most valuable fossils of all-time: behind only Tyrannosaurus Rex, Velociraptor, Triceratops and Gorgosaurus.

New analysis of a tool that dates back 300,000 years has revealed that our ancestors were skilled craftspeople that made useful hunting weapons designed for comfort, efficiency and longevity. Some of these skills are still seen in woodwork today.

Imagine if you were tasked with sorting and separating thousands of tiny fossils, most of them less than a millimeter wide. It would quite a tedious, time-consuming task … which is why scientists have recently created a robot to do the job.

Fossil has been one of the biggest backers of Wear OS, putting out numerous smartwatches powered by Google's software, and its new Gen 5E line offers wearables that are a little smaller and more affordable than the main Gen 5 models.

Although many fossils are simply lying exposed on the soil's surface, finding all of them would require a great deal of walking over varying terrain. A new autonomous hexacopter drone could help, as it uses a laser to hunt for fossils at night.

Fossil is almost single-handedly keeping the Wear OS flag flying in the smartwatch market, and the Gen 5 wearables are the best Fossil smartwatches yet. We strapped one to our wrist to see what it has to offer.

It can be hard to picture a living creature from dusty bones and old footprints, but now that might require a little less imagination. Researchers at EPFL and the Humboldt University of Berlin have built a robot to figure out just how a 300-million year-old ancestor of ours might have moved around.

​Over the past several years, Belgian manufacturing firm Materialise has 3D-printed items such as running shoes, a dress and a wheelchair. Now, the company has created something a little larger – a complete wooly mammoth skeleton.