* Astronomy

Scientists have found a "missing link" in the early evolution of seals from land mammals to the marine carnivores we see today.
Palaeontologists working in the North have discovered a skeleton in an ancient Arctic lake bed that has given them a glance of the animal's land-to-sea transition, which had been difficult to study because of a lack of fossil evidence.
The fossil skeleton, thought to be 20 to 24 million years old, was found in 2007 during an expedition to a meteor impact crater that once formed a lake on Devon Island, Nunavut.

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The discovery of fossilised remains belonging to the world's largest snake has been reported in Nature journal.
Titanoboa was 13m long - about the length of a bus - and lived in the rainforest of north-east Colombia 58-60 million years ago.
The snake was so wide it would have reached up to a person's hips, say researchers, who have estimated that it weighed more than a tonne.

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A recent study by researchers at the University of Bath and London's Natural History Museum has found that scientists' knowledge of the evolution of dinosaurs is remarkably complete.
Evolutionary biologists use two ways to study the evolution of prehistoric plants and animals: firstly they use radioactive dating techniques to put fossils in chronological order according to the age of the rocks in which they are found (stratigraphy); secondly they observe and classify the characteristics of fossilised remains according to their relatedness (morphology).
Dr Matthew Wills from the University of Bath's Department of Biology & Biochemistry worked with Dr Paul Barrett from the Natural History Museum and Julia Heathcote at Birkbeck College (London) to analyse statistical data from fossils of the four major groups of dinosaur to see how closely they matched their trees of evolutionary relatedness.
The researchers found that the fossil record for the dinosaurs studied, ranging from gigantic sauropods to two-legged meat eaters such as T. rex, matched very well with the evolutionary tree, meaning that the current view of evolution of these creatures is very accurate.

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Scientists discover new species of prehistoric giants
Dinosaur hunters on a month-long expedition to the Sahara desert have unearthed not one but two possible new species of extinct animals. Their success marks one of the most exciting discoveries to come out of Africa for 50 years.
The team have discovered what appears to be a new type of pterosaur and a previously unknown sauropod, a species of giant plant-eating dinosaur. Both would have lived almost one hundred million years ago.
The palaeontologists discovered a large fragment of beak from a giant flying reptile and a more than one metre long bone from a sauropod, which indicates an animal of almost 20 metres  in length. The discovery of both is extremely rare.

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