The 460,000 years old skull of a woolly rhino, reconstructed from 53 fragments, is the oldest example of the mighty, ice age beasts ever found in Europe. The extinct mammals reached a length of three and a half metres in adulthood and, unlike their modern relatives, were covered in shaggy hair. The research team says that the find from Germany fills a gap in our understanding of how these animals evolved. "This is the oldest woolly rhinoceros found in Europe," said Ralf-Dietrich Kahlke, Senckenberg Research Institute, Weimar, Germany. "It gives us a precise date for the first appearance of cold-climate animals spreading throughout Asia and Europe during the ice ages," he added.Gamma-ray burst was brightest ever
Astronomers from around the world have combined data from ground and space based telescopes to paint a detailed portrait of a stellar explosion that was briefly brighter than the galaxy that contained it, visible to the naked eye despite originating halfway across the universe. The gamma-ray burst, was the result of a massive star's explosion 7.5 billion years ago that sent a pencil-beam of intense light on a direct collision course for Earth. It is the only known gamma-ray burst to have had a visible component bright enough to see with the naked eye. "This was the brightest optical and infrared event that mankind has ever recorded," said Joshua Bloom, Assistant Professor, Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley.
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