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This is Defector, a new sports blog and media company. We made this place together, we own it together, we run it together. Without access, without favor, without discretion, and without interference.

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Defector

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winter 2023 gift (eyebrow)

The Defector Crewneck Sweatshirt Is Back In Stock

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Merch v3


<p>charismatic megafauna (they/them)</p>


Typing

Sabrina Imbler

Life reconstruction of Ninumbeehan dookoodukah in a palaeoenvironment reconstruction depicting its life and burrowing across seasons. (a) Ninumbeehan is resting on the edge of a river with a low water table as the wet season ends. (b) A small community of Ninumbeehan are in their estivation burrows at the apex of the arid season. (c) The onset of the humid season brings rain, triggering a mass emergence of Ninumbeehan from their estivation burrows.

Copy of Temnospondyl New Taxon small

Creaturefector

How A Sleepy Ancient Amphibian Became A Link To An Endangered Language

Three photos depicting fossil human footprints at White Sands National Park, one showing a person photographing them, one shot of several footprints, one shot of a single footprint

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Science

Kick Back And Read About This Ancient Feet Controversy

A reconstruction of the ancient enormous whale Perucetus colossus

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Why He Look Like That?

Paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, Professor Lee Rogers Berger holds a replica of the skull of "NEO" a new skeleton fossil findings of the Homo Naledi Hominin species at the cradle of Human Kind in Maropeng near Johannesburg on May, 9 2017 in South Africa. Primitive hominids may have lived in Africa at the same time as humans, researchers said Tuesday, in new findings that could change the understanding of human evolution. Fossils found deep in South Africa's Rising Star cave complex in 2013 have been dated by several expert teams with their findings suggesting the hominids, called Homo naledi, may have lived alongside Homo sapiens. It had previously been thought that the hominids were millions of years old. A team of 20 scientists from laboratories and institutions around the world, including in South Africa and Australia, established the age of the fossils which suggests that Homo naledi may well have lived at the same time as humans. (Photo by GULSHAN KHAN / AFP) (Photo by GULSHAN KHAN/AFP via Getty Images)

SAFRICA-SCIENCE-PALEONTOLOGY-EVOLUTION-HUMAN

Here’s A Recap Of Lots Of Science Drama About Ancient Human Death

Artistic reconstruction of Megasiphon thylakos, a benthic organism that lived directly on the seafloor. The tunicate looks like two ghostly cylinders sitting on the seafloor

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Sea Squirts Started From The Bottom, Now They’re Here

Present-day katydids of the genus Arethaea, pictured here, have the same internal structures as those seen in the fossil.

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They Found An Old Bug Ball

A prehistoric tully monster, looks like a squid with stalked eyes and a jointed trunk with a toothy pincer mouth at the end.

Tullimonstrum gregarium, known as the Tully Monster.

The Mystery Of The Tully Monster Will Never Be Solved

A closely packed colony of Apis dorsata giant honeybees

Animal India

Whoopsies! Fossil From The Dawn Of Life Actually Just Bees

A paleoart illustration of the pterosaur Balaenognathus maeuseri, showing a creature with a long bill that tapers to a flat end, lots of tiny verticle teeth, and a red beady eye staring out from an orange and blue face.

Now That’s What I Call Teeth!

An illustration of the absolute unit of a wombat, the extinct Ramsayia, standing next to a puny modern wombat.

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This Ancient Wombat Was An Absolute Unit

The new fossil fish, Qikiqtania wakei, with its famous cousin Tiktaalik below.

Qikiqtania_recon

Animals

New Fossil Fish Flirted With The Idea Of Legs But Kept On Swimming

fossils