Defending champion Gediminas Bagdonas (An Post) survived a massive crash in the peloton with around 50km to go yesterday to rejoin the front of the race with the help of his team and take victory on stage three of the An Post Rás in Westport yesterday.

THE title of Colin Tudge’s new book The Link: Uncovering our Earliest Ancestor is a little misleading. Our earliest ancestor was a bacterium which lived 3.2 billion years ago, whereas the book celebrates the fossilised remains of an animal which lived a mere 47 million years ago.

SCIENTISTS have unveiled a 47-million-year-old fossilised skeleton of a monkey hailed as the missing link in human evolution.

Norwegian researchers on a remote Arctic island have recovered rare fossil remains of two giant marine reptiles, one of them reminiscent of the fabled Loch Ness monster.