John Fortin was wrapping up a day of haying on his family beef farm on Saturday evening and happy he had beat the rainstorm.

Then he got a call from his neighbor telling him lightning had just struck a tree where eight of Fortin's cows had taken shelter from the rain. All eight had been electrocuted and were dead.

Those eight heifers represent 10 percent of the Fortin Farm's Angus 80-animal beef herd. The loss is a huge economic and emotional blow to the farm in Winslow that has been in the Fortin family for four generations.

"That storm rolled in around 5:30 and only lasted maybe an hour, but there was a lot of lightning close by," Fortin said. "My neighbor calls and says, 'Hey, lightning just hit the big pine tree on top of the hill and I have dead cows over here.'"

Stunning relief carvings of camels in Saudi Arabia are now thought to date back more than 7,000 years - making them more than three times as old as was first suggested. Previously, it was thought the ancient camel sculptures found in the northern province of Al Jouf were about 2,000 years old.

However, chemical analysis and the examination of tool marks helped to show that the carvings at the site were made in the sixth millennium BCE.
It means the remarkable life-size sandstone carvings of camels and other animals, including a donkey, are the world's oldest surviving large-scale reliefs.

"They are absolutely stunning and, bearing in mind we see them now in a heavily eroded state with many panels fallen, the original site must've been absolutely mind blowing," said Dr Maria Guagnin, from the department of archaeology at Germany's Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, the lead author of a new study on the late Stone Age carvings.

"There were life-sized camels and equids two or three layers on top of each other. It must have been an absolutely stunning site in the Neolithic."

Researchers heard about the site about five years ago and before the coronavirus pandemic, Dr Guagnin and other specialists made two visits of about 10 days each to examine the carvings.

The presence of camel reliefs at Petra in Jordan, produced by Nabataeans about 2,000 years ago, had suggested the Saudi carvings may be about two millennia old. However, a stone mason analysing the camel site carvings did not find evidence that metal tools had been used and there was no sign of pottery.

Weathering and erosion patterns, high-tech analysis involving fluorescence and luminescence and radiocarbon dating of remains also indicated an early origin.

"Every day the Neolithic was more likely [as the time when the carvings were made] until we realised it was absolutely a Neolithic site we were looking at," Dr Guagnin said.

Researchers also came from the Saudi Ministry of Culture, King Saud University and France's Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Four dolphins stranded Friday at Point of Rocks Landing Beach in Brewster, according to Yarmouth Port-based International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Two of the dolphins were already dead when a team led by IFAW assistant research coordinator Kristy Volker arrived.

The remaining two — a pregnant female and a juvenile male — were transported to Herring Cove in Provincetown around 5 p.m., Volker said. Before they were released, the two dolphins were given a physical check that included an ultrasound and a blood test.

In the middle of Sydney's lockdown, scientist Jodi Rowley has been retrieving frozen dead frogs from her doorstep.

Occasionally one will arrive dried and shrivelled up in the post.

She'll pack them in ice in an esky to be taken to her lab at the Australian Museum, where even more samples - green tree frogs, striped marsh frogs and the invasive cane toad among them - are waiting in a freezer for genetic testing.

Rowley and her team, along with scientists at the Australian Registry of Wildlife Health at Taronga zoo and a forensic unit in the NSW department of planning, industry and environment, are trying to solve the mystery of what is killing Australia's frogs.

Since late July, they've collected 1,200 records of dead or dying frogs, about 70% of them in New South Wales and 22% in Queensland.

Ten dogs belonging to the Proprietor of Global Growth Academy, Amokpo, Umuanunwa, Nteje in the Oyi Local Government Area of Anambra State have reportedly pounced on and killed a three-year-old child on the school premises.

The incident was said to have happened around 7.10am on Wednesday, September 15, when the victim, identified as Obinna Ude, was taken to the school by his uncle, Chima Ude, for enrollment.

According to a resident of the community, the three-year-old strayed off while his uncle was filling forms and perfecting the enrollment documentation.

The 10 dogs, on sighting the child, broke out of their cage, pounced on the boy and mauled him.

A 33-year-old man from Sopore, who was grievously injured in a canine attack some 12 days ago, succumbed at home Saturday evening.

Reports said the victim Shabir Ahmad Dar, son of Ali Mohammad Dar, a resident of Sangrampora in Sopore, was attacked by dogs at Main chowk Sopore on September 06, 2021.

He was brought to SMHS Hospital in Srinagar from SDH Sopore. After treatment, he was discharged from the hospital. However, today evening he succumbed to his injuries, locals said.

A 40-foot-long humpback whale was founding floating in the water off the shores of Staten Island early Friday.

Video of the whale was first posted on Citizen shortly after 9 a.m., showing its body just yards away from the shoreline of Great Kills Beach.

Rob DiGiovanni, the founder and chief scientist at the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, says that their nonprofit is currently working with authorities and the New York City Parks Department to figure out how to get the whale out of the water for examination and proper disposal.

While it is still too soon to know what led to the whale's death, DiGiovanni says that many humpback whales end up washing ashore after being killed in what they call human-induced mortality events, such as vessel strikes or entanglement issues.

A new study led by Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Curtis Marean and ASU doctoral graduate Emily Hallett details more than 60 tools made of bone and one tool made from the tooth of a cetacean, which includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. These finds, first unearthed from Contrebandiers Cave, Morocco, in 2011, are highly suggestive proxy evidence for the earliest clothing in the archaeological record and attest to the pan-African emergence of complex culture and specialized tool manufacture.

The invention of clothing, and the development of the tools needed to create it, are milestones in the story of humanity. Not only are they indicative of strides in cultural and cognitive evolution, archaeologists also believe they were essential in enabling early humans to expand their niche from Pleistocene Africa into new environments with new ecological challenges. However, as furs and other organic materials used to make clothing are unlikely to be preserved in the archaeological record, the origin of clothing is still poorly understood.

The current study published this week in iScience, which reports on a worked bone assemblage found near the Atlantic Coast of Morocco, provides strong evidence for the manufacture of clothing as far back as 120,000 years ago.

As part of her research with the Institute of Human Origins and the Lise Meitner Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH), Hallett was studying the vertebrate remains from Contrebandiers Cave deposits dating from 120,000 to 90,000 years ago.

This is the moment a goat and a rooster fended off a hawk that was attacking a chicken on a farm in the Netherlands.

Jaap Beets, 59, was inside his farmhouse in Gelderland on September 5 when he heard ear-piercing screeching coming from his livestock outside.

In an attack that lasted just 17 seconds, a hawk swooped down on one of his chickens, but his other animals saved the hen before the Mr Beets arrived on the scene.

Dramatic CCTV footage shows the goshawk dive-bombing a brown hen, sending feathers flying all over the paddock.

The Yamnaya, one of the the earliest pastoralist populations of the Eurasian steppe, began expanding out of the Pontic-Caspian steppe more than 5000 years ago. These migrations resulted in gene flow across vast areas, ultimately linking pastoralist populations in Scandinavia with groups that expanded into Siberia. Just how and why these pastoralists travelled such extraordinary distances in the Bronze Age has remained a mystery. Now a new study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History has revealed a critical clue. The Bronze Age migrations seem to coincide with a simple but important dietary shift - the adoption of milk drinking.

The researchers drew on a humble but extraordinary source of information from the archaeological record - they looked at ancient tartar (dental calculus) on the teeth of preserved skeletons. By carefully removing samples of the built-up calculus, and using advanced molecular methods to extract and then analyse the proteins still preserved within this resistant and protective material, the researchers were able to identify which ancient individuals likely drank milk, and which did not.

Their results surprised them. "The pattern was incredibly strong," observes study leader and palaeoproteomics specialist Dr. Shevan Wilkin, "The majority of pre-Bronze Age Eneolithic individuals we tested - over 90% - showed absolutely no evidence of consuming dairy. In contrast, a remarkable 94% of the Early Bronze Age individuals had clearly been milk drinkers."