My Green Meadows

With a name like T. rex, you’d expect to be safe from even the fiercest paleo-bullies. Turns out, ancient, flying reptiles could have snacked on Tyrannosaurus Rex babies and other landlubbing runts of the dinosaur world.

A new study reveals a group of flying reptiles that lived during the Age of Dinosaurs some 230 million to 65 million years ago did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land.

Until now, paleontologists pictured the so-called “winged lizards” or pterosaurs as skim-feeders. In this vision, the creatures would have flown over lakes and oceans grabbing fish from the water’s surface, much as gulls do today.

“In our hypothesis, flight is primarily a locomotive method,” said co-researcher Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth in England. “They’re just using it to get from point A to point B. We think the majority of their lives, when they’re feeding and reproducing, that’s all being done on the ground rather than in the air.”

The Epic of Gilgamesh is, perhaps, the oldest written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script. It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).

Stonehenge may have been a burial ground for an ancient royal family, researchers said on Thursday.

New radiocarbon dates of human remains excavated from the ancient stone monument suggest it was used as a cemetery from its inception just after 3000 BC until well after the larger circle of stones went up around 2500 BC.

Previously, archaeologists had believed people were buried at Stonehenge between 2700 and 2600 B.C.

“The hypothesis we are working on is that Stonehenge represents a place of the dead,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield, who is leading an excavation of the site. “That seems to be very clear.”

“A further twist is that the people buried at Stonehenge may have been the elite of their society, an ancient royal British dynasty, perhaps.”

Built between 3000 and 1600 BC as a temple, burial ground, astronomical calendar or all three, the stone circle is sometimes called “Britain’s pyramids”.

Experts discuss tips and tricks to let loose your inner ingenuity

John Houtz is a psychologist and professor at Fordham University. His most recent book is The Educational Psychology of Creativity (Hamptom Press, 2002).

The photographs of the tribe near the border between Brazil and Peru are rare evidence that such groups exist. A Brazilian official involved in the expedition said many of them are in increasing danger from illegal logging.

“The world needs to wake up to this, and ensure that their territory is protected in accordance with international law. Otherwise, they will soon be made extinct,” said Stephen Corry, the director of Survival International, which supports tribal people around the world.

Of more than 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, more than half live in either Brazil or Peru, Survival International says. It says all are in grave danger of being forced off their land, killed and ravaged by new diseases.

It’s not a new ad by Greenpeace, but it’s beautiful and we’ve never featured it on TreeHugger before, so here it is.

The central message of the ad is quite important: oceans get too little credit for their oxygen production, as well as their capacity to absorb CO2. So the next time someone mentions tropical rainforests as “the lungs of the Earth”, have a thought for poor forgotten phytoplanktons. See also: ::Video: Amazing Commercial — Can’t tell you more, ::Best Solar-Power Commercial Ever?