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A 380-million-year-old heart, the oldest ever found, coupled with a separate fossilized stomach, intestine, and liver were found in an ancient jawed fish, providing new insight into how our own bodies have changed through time. The newly discovered anatomy of arthrodires, a class of extinct armored fishes that flourished between 419.2 million years ago and 358.9 million years ago, is similar to that of modern sharks, according to new research that was just published in Science. This discovery provides crucial new evolutionary clues. Given the rarity of finding 3D preservation of soft tissues from ancient animals, lead researcher John Curtin Distinguished Professor Kate Trinajstic of Curtin's School of Molecular and Life Sciences and the Western Australian Museum said the discovery was exceptional. As a palaeontologist with more than 20 years of experience studying fossils, Professor Trinajstic stated, "I was absolutely shocked to see a 3D and wonderfully preserved heart in a 3...

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen have genetically sequenced the whipworm, one of the oldest human parasites, using stool samples from Viking latrines. The mapping depicts the parasite's global distribution and its complex interactions with people, which can both make us healthy and ill. Researchers from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the University of Copenhagen and the Wellcome Sanger Institute (UK) have performed the largest and most thorough genetic analysis of the whipworm, one of the oldest parasites found in humans, using fossilized eggs in up to 2500-year-old feces from Viking settlements in Denmark and other nations. The research, which was published in Nature Communications, offers brand-new information regarding the parasite's evolution and early dispersal. This information can be used to make efforts to stop the parasite's proliferation and development of drug resistance. According to the study, over thousands of years, the paras...

The Australian National University (ANU) researchers' discovery of three bodies on Indonesia's Alor Island, dated from 7,500 to 13,000 years ago, has provided new insight into the burial customs and movement patterns of the oldest humans in island Southeast Asia. The three burials are crucial, according to Dr. Sofia Samper Carro, the author of a recent research that was published by PLOS ONE, since the placement of each body reveals a different mortuary procedure. According to Dr. Samper Carro, this might be connected to the numerous migration routes that passed through the region thousands of years ago. Dr. Samper Carro stated that "burials provide a unique cultural manifestation to explore waves of migration through the terminal Pleistocene to the Holocene period in Southeast Asia." Our findings "contribute to a growing body of research describing prehistoric socio-cultural behavior in this region" by offering "important new data for understanding the...