Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The fossil record shows Homo sapiens (also known as "modern humans" or "anatomically modern humans") living in Africa by about 350,000-260,000 years ago. The earliest known Homo sapiens fossils include the Jebel Irhoud remains from Morocco ( c. 315,000 years ago ), [ 4 ] the Florisbad Skull from South Africa ( c. 259,000 years ago ), and the ...
Fossil remains of Hyracotherium show it to have differed from the modern horse in three important respects: it was a small animal (the size of a fox), lightly built and adapted for running; the limbs were short and slender, and the feet elongated so that the digits were almost vertical, with four digits in the forelimbs and three digits in the ...
Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. According to modern evolutionary biology, all living beings could be descendants of a unique ancestor commonly referred to as the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) of all life on Earth.
Australopithecus afarensis is an extinct species of australopithecine which lived from about 3.9–2.9 million years ago (mya) in the Pliocene of East Africa. The first fossils were discovered in the 1930s, but major fossil finds would not take place until the 1970s
A living fossil is an extant taxon that phenotypically resembles related species known only from the fossil record. To be considered a living fossil, the fossil species must be old relative to the time of origin of the extant clade. Living fossils commonly are of species-poor lineages, but they need not be.
A transitional fossil is any fossilized remains of a life form that exhibits traits common to both an ancestral group and its derived descendant group. [1] This is especially important where the descendant group is sharply differentiated by gross anatomy and mode of living from the ancestral group.
More than 260 dinosaur footprints discovered in Brazil and Cameroon provide further evidence that South America and Africa were once connected as part of a giant continent millions of years ago.
The hominin remains that fossilised over time at the Cradle of Humankind are found in dolomitic caves, and are often encased in a mixture of limestone and other sediments called breccia. Early hominids may have lived throughout Africa, but their remains are found only at sites where conditions allowed for the formation and preservation of fossils.