News — News

Every three years the International Society of Arachnology (ISA) organizes a large international conference (the next one is in USA, 2016), with regional (Europe, USA, etc.) meetings being hosted by local societies and held in each of the intervening two years. The next (30th) European meeting will be held in the UK and hosted by Dr Sara Goodacre and colleagues at the University of Nottingham in 2017, as confirmed at the recent European Society of Arachnology conference just held in the Czech Republic. There is no website as yet, but one will be made available in due course and a...

Scientists have just published new research that will shake up our understanding of the progress of human evolution and even pose new questions about our identity. The team has called this new species of human relative "Homo naledi," and they say it appears to have buried its dead -- a behavior scientists previously thought was limited to humans. Standing at the entrance to the cave where the fossils were found, Lee Berger (lead author on the paper) said: "We have just encountered another species that perhaps thought about its own mortality, and went to great risk and effort to dispose...

A new genus of British dinosaur has just been formally erected for Polacanthus rudgwickensis described by William T Blows in 1996. The specimen consists of one nearly complete dorsal vertebra, a dorsal vertebral centrum, an anterior caudal vertebra, fragments of other vertebrae, the proximal end of the left scapula with a fused coracoid fragment, a distal end of a humerus, a nearly complete right tibia, rib fragments, two dermal bones and many small fragments. Dorsal vertebra of the new genus in posterior, lateral and anterior views The new genus, Horshamosaurus Blows, 2015 is formally erected, justified and diagnosed, along with...

We are all familiar with CGI images of dinosaurs on our TV screens, but few may be aware that the same technology has been used to bring fossil insects 'back to life' as well! New research just published in the journal Arthropod Structure & Development (click here) revisits the fossilized larva of a green lacewing Hallucinochrysa diogenesi preserved in Cretaceous amber from Spain, originally described in 2012. The new article expands on the presumed behaviour of this species and includes a CGI video reconstruction of the larva in action. The video can be viewed by clicking here. This remarkable fossil...