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While life was once thought to just be a happy accident by mainstream science, the building blocks of DNA and RNA are proving to be not only tenacious, these organic molecules also appear to be able to form in the most unlikely of places, including in deep space on the surface of comets.

In 2014, the Philae lander touched down on the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and during it’s investigation of the comet’s chemical makeup, it detected the presence of 16 types of organic compounds. These findings prompted the development of an organics detector for the lander, which led to experiments that simulated the chemical makeup and environmental conditions of the comet to determine what could be found there.
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One of the frustrating aspects that paleontologists face when studying dinosaur fossils is the odd lack of sexual dimorphism in the ancient creatures — being able to tell the difference between male and female individuals based on their physical features. However, one method of telling whether an individual specimen is a female or not has been uncovered, with the confirmation of a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil that came from a pregnant female.

"This analysis allows us to determine the gender of this fossil, and gives us a window into the evolution of egg laying in modern birds," says the study’s lead researcher, North Carolina State University evolutionary biologist Mary Schweitzer.
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Recent DNA testing has been conducted on a set of ancient elongated Peruvian skulls that have baffled researchers for decades, due to their unusual shape and size. While the DNA testing is not complete, the results seem to indicate that the individuals they originally belonged to were not human.
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It has been generally accepted in many areas of the scientific community that the Shroud of Turin was created in Italy and is of European origin, but new DNA evidence shows that it was in areas that the historical record has always suggested.

The Shroud has recently had samples of particles taken from the artifact undergo DNA testing, to determine what peoples and plants were represented by the debris that have been deposited on it over the centuries.

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