Science News Roundup: Bear-sized wombat cousin roamed Australia 25 million years ago; Frigid dwarf planet Pluto may have started out its life as a hothead and more

Frigid dwarf planet Pluto may have started out its life as a hothead Pluto, a frigid little world inhabiting the solar system's outer reaches, may have been born as a warmer place sheltering a subsurface ocean that still exists today, researchers said on Monday.

Following is a summary of current science news briefs.

Subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa deemed potentially 'habitable'

Scientists have figured out how the subsurface ocean on Jupiter's moon Europa may have formed and determined that this vast expanse of water may have been able to support microbial life in the past. Europa, with an ocean hidden beneath a thick shell of ice, long has been viewed as a potential habitat for extraterrestrial life in our solar system, alongside other candidates such as Mars and Saturn's moon Enceladus. A new study presented on Wednesday at a geoscience conference underscores its potential.

Bear-sized wombat cousin roamed Australia 25 million years ago

A powerfully built relative of modern wombats that was the size of a black bear roamed Australia's woodlands about 25 million years ago, possessing shovel-shaped hands and strong forelimbs indicating it was an adept digger, scientists said on Thursday. The plant-eating mammal called Mukupirna nambensis, known from the fossil of a partial skull and much of the skeleton unearthed at Lake Pinpa in northeastern South Australia state is one of the earliest-known large-bodied Australian marsupials, they said.

Siberian heat wave is a 'warning cry' from the Arctic, climate scientists say

Pine trees are bursting into flames. Boggy peatlands are tinderbox dry. And towns in northern Russia are sweltering under conditions more typical of the tropics. Reports of record-breaking Arctic heat registered at more than 100 Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) in the Siberian town of Verkhoyansk on June 20 – are still being verified by the World Meteorological Organization. But even without that confirmation, experts at the global weather agency are worried by satellite images showing that much of the Russian Arctic is in the red.

Frigid dwarf planet Pluto may have started out its life as a hothead

Pluto, a frigid little world inhabiting the solar system's outer reaches, may have been born as a warmer place sheltering a subsurface ocean that still exists today, researchers said on Monday. An analysis of images of its surface taken in 2015 by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft and computer simulations of the dwarf planet's interior led the researchers to propose a "hot start" scenario for Pluto's formation some 4.5 billion years ago as the solar system, including Earth, took shape.

(With inputs from agencies.)