Forbes Scientists using data from Chinese lunar orbiters have discovered what they think is a mass of granite 30 miles wide deep under the surface of the moon. Located under the moon’s far side, it’s unlike anything found before. Presented today at the at the Goldschmidt Conferencein Lyon, France, a paper has also been published […]
Dallas Morning News Matt Siegler, a planetary scientist at SMU, was digging into old data to figure out how hot it is under the moon’s surface when he came upon something surprising: evidence of a massive, ancient volcano. The moon has always sparked the human imagination — the first known story of explorers landing on […]
Newsweek – I knew right away we had something special, especially considering it was so old,” said Michael Polcyn, a vertebrate paleontologist and mosasaur expert at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The discovery of the oldest fossil of a marine reptile, dating back 94 million years, is shedding new light on the evolution of […]
SMU News – Evidence of an early savannah grass growing millions of years earlier than previously known may fundamentally change the understanding of life in the prehistoric world. A pair of studies funded by the National Science Foundation and published in the journal Science document the earliest evidence for locally abundant open-habitat grasses in eastern Africa and how those environments […]
Dedman College News- Here are some of the Dedman College 2022 research highlights. For the full article please visit SMU News: A study led by fire anthropologist Christopher Roos suggests bringing “good fire” back to the U.S. and other wildfire fire-prone areas, as Native Americans once did, could potentially blunt the role of climate in triggering today’s […]
SMU News- The dominant tree species belonged within the legume family, which includes beans, peas, and giant trees in tropical forests. “We have estimated the lake beds that contain the fossils were present for about 50,000 to 60,000 years,” said Bonnie Jacobs, an emeritus professor and paleobotanist at SMU (Southern Methodist University) and a co-author […]
Dallas Morning News – Dallas scientists say the comet takes 50,000 years to make a trip around the sun. A bright-green comet that has not been seen since the last ice age will be visible in D-FW skies later this month. The comet, called C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was discovered by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient […]
AXIOS – For 400 years, Native Americans appear to have blunted the impact of climate in triggering wildfires. Find out how, through this study led by SMU‘s Christopher Roos. A study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances found that historical Indigenous “cultural burning” curtailed wildfire patterns on local scales over a period of roughly 400 years […]
SMU’s paleontologists Louis Jacobs and Michael Polcyn helped find fossils of this flying reptile of the dinosaur. Learn more is Science Daily
D Magazine: Travis Nolan is the only person making show-quality origami dinosaurs in the university’s department of earth sciences. The Walt Disney movie Dinosaur wasn’t well received when it premiered in 2000, but it did change Travis Nolan’s life. He was 3 years old when his father gave him a gray and red rubber hand puppet of […]