Ancient DNA suggests ancestors of Estonians, Finns and Hungarians lived in Siberia 4,500 years ago - Live Science

The population of this animal likely began to decline during a warming period approximately 120,000 years ago. It eventually went extinct later on, though the exact time of its extinction remains unknown. In Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains, the remains of a previously unknown large animal were discovered; it lived during the Ice Age and was a close relative of modern yaks. The existence of this species was confirmed through ancient DNA analysis. The bones found were too fragmented to identify the animal’s species based solely on its physical characteristics. It is noted that the new species has been provisionally named “Yak X.” Its evolutionary line diverged from the ancestors of modern yaks approximately 400,000 years ago. The researchers studied 20 bone fragments: 14 from Denisova Cave and another six from other sites in the region. The age of the samples spans a significant period—from 250,000–200,000 years ago to approximately 27,000 years ago. Despite the poor state of preservation of the remains, scientists were able to reconstruct 20 ancient genomes.

In this excerpt from "The Story of the Mammals in 25 Discoveries," author Donald R. Prothero looks at a time when the idea of extinction was blasphemous.

The Moon is getting closer to its full phase, with more of its surface visible as the days go by. Here's what you can look for when you look up at the sky tonight. What is today's Moon phase? As of Friday, Oct. 23, NASA's Daily Moon Guide tracker tells us the Moon is in the Waxing Gibbous phase, with 90% of its surface visible. Tonight, without the use of visual aids you should be able to spot the Copernicus Crater, the Mare Serenitatis, and Mare Fecunditatis. If you have binoculars you'll also see the Endymion Crater, the Alphonsus Crater, and the Clavius Crater. Plus, if you have a telescope, you'll also see the Linne Crater, Rima Ariadaeus, and the Apollo 17 landing spot. When is the next Full Moon? The next Full Moon will take place on October 25 or 26, depending on your timezone. What are Moon phases? The Moon takes around 29.5 days to travel around Earth, and its appearance changes throughout the month. As it moves around our planet, we see different amounts of its sunlit side, from a slim crescent to the quarter phases and eventually a Full Moon. It then begins the cycle again.

Every morning during the Martian spring and summer, a thin and extremely long cloud emerges, only to disappear again. The wispy formation appears near the volcano Arsia Mons and gradually elongates until it reaches over 1,000 miles—about the distance from New York to Kansas City as the crow flies—before dissipating. This cycle then repeats for several months. Since it was first recorded by a probe in 2018, scientists have been unable to find a plausible explanation for the existence of this cloud, often referred to as the Arsia Mons Elongated Cloud (AMEC). Until now. Recently, researchers successfully modeled the cloud’s formation for the first time, their results suggesting that it may be driven by a physical process that has never been directly observed in any planet's atmosphere. "We found that we needed to include some exotic physics … physics that, while included in textbooks, is treated as theoretical and usually thought not to happen in nature. It certainly hasn’t been seen in action before," Jorge Hernández-Bernal, a planetary scientist at Paris’ Sorbonne Université and lead author of the study, said in a press release.