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[ad_1] The world just had its hottest year ever recorded, and 2024 has already set a new heat record for the warmest January ever observed, according to the European Union's climate change monitoring service Copernicus.  The service said that January 2024 had a global average air temperature of 13.14 degrees Celsius, or 55.65 degrees Fahrenheit. That temperature was 0.70 degrees Celsius above the 1991 to 2020 average for the month and 0.12 degrees Celsius above the last warmest January, in 2020.  It was also 1.66 degrees Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial average for the month.  Surface air temperature anomaly for January 2024 relative to the January average for the period 1991-2020. Data source: ERA5 Copernicus Climate Change Service/ECMWF "2024 starts with another record-breaking month," Samantha Burgess, deputy director of the Copernicus Clima

[ad_1] A first-of-its-kind fossil of a mammal and a dinosaur from around 125 million years ago "locked in mortal combat" challenges the idea that dinosaurs ruled the land, researchers wrote in a study published Tuesday.  The new fossil, discovered on May 16, 2012, in China's Liaoning Province, shows a mammal attacking a dinosaur about three times its size. The mammal, a carnivorous Repenomamus robustus, was the clear aggressor, researchers wrote in the journal Scientific Reports . "The mammal died while biting two of the dinosaur's left anterior dorsal ribs; its mandible plunges downward into the indurated sediment to firmly clasp the bones," the study's authors wrote.  The discovery of the two creatures is among the first evidence to show actual predatory behavior by a mammal on a dinosaur, Dr. Jordan Mallon, palaeobiologist with the Canadian Museum of Nature and co-author on the study said in a press release. R