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Amphibian fossils, particularly those capturing larval stages, are exceptionally rare due to tadpoles’ soft, delicate bodies, which are highly prone to decay.
The Balkans and Anatolia once formed a single landmass separated from the rest of Europe, and may have been a major stepping stone in a mammalian invasion from Asia.
Not the first place you'd expect to find a whale, isn't it?
The Royal Mint is honoring her work in the field of paleontology.
The 20,000-year-old remains of a mammoth bear signs of human hunting and butchery.
The 'well-dressed' dinosaur may offer hints about how birds such as peacocks evolved to show off.
Small, dinosaur-like animals may have been the ancestors of the first flying vertebrates.
Sometimes, it's best to admit that we simply don't know the right answer (yet).
These flying reptiles dominated the skies until they were wiped out by a killer asteroid.
Although they had fur and whiskers, the earliest mammals had long lifespans like reptiles.
This pristinely preserved scene in fossilized amber is an extremely rare example of ancient predation in action.
It's amazing what you can do with one fossil.
The perfect Valentine's dinosaur -- a massive Titanosaur!
To the untrained eye, they look just like plants, static and seemingly inactive. But things are not always as they seem.
This isn't the last piece of the puzzle -- in fact, it's the very first.
We don't even know if they were plants or animals.
The 245-million-year-old fossils overturns the established view that early dino relatives were the size of a chicken and feeble.
Geoscientists working in South America have uncovered an ancient berry.
Bones to stones.
Paleontologists have identified an ancient hyena-like canine that occupied eastern North America approximately 12 million years ago. The coyote-sized dog had a massive jaw which scientists say it used to crush bones.
Sauropods, or some titanosaurs at least, were not the best parents. A recent analysis of juvenile fossils belonging to a titanosaur species called Rapetosaurus krausei suggests babies were left to fend for themselves and find food since they hatched, with little if any weaning.
It was a finding that sent ripples throughout the entire paleontology community. Met with heavy criticism, the authors are now vindicated.
Researchers have found new fauna in northern Brazil, in what used to be the continent of Gondwana.
Tyrannosaurus was one of the fiercest land predators ever, despite claims that the dinosaur was mostly a scavenger. While this is true to a degree, T-Rex was most definitely a hunter at heart even though the predator might have munched on a carcass or two from time to time. Apparently, the dinosaur even ate its own kind, a new study suggests.
This bizarre creature looks like a cross between a scorpion and a boat, which is pretty accurate considering it was actually as big as a boat. Pentecopterus decorahensis, named after the ancient Greek warship, likely dominated the Ordovician ocean waters some 460 to 248 million years ago, paleontologists say. Sporting a thick head shield, a paddle for a tail, large grasping limbs and 1.7 meters in length (5.5 feet), this sea beast was a force to be reckoned with.
A novel analysis reveals T-rex and other theropods – the top land predators that dominated the planet for no less than 165 million years – had teeth of unrivaled complexity. The long and powerful teeth were serrated like steak knives to disembowel prey easily, while on the inside tissue supported the teeth for maximum resistance against […]
Traces of soft tissue and red blood cells were discovered by accident by a team of paleontologists and biologists while they were playing around in the lab with so-called "crap" fossils dug up more than 100 years ago in Canada. Usually, museum curators are very proud and picky about the works they display or hold in storage, and any analysis that involves breaking or sectioning a fossil is most often than not strictly forbidden. But these fossils - like a claw from a meat-eating therapod, the limb from a duck-billed dinosaur and even the toe of a triceratops-like animal - were fragments in poor conditions that nobody really cared about. One man's trash, another man's treasure.
Each year, hundreds of millions people fly by plane to meet family, do business or travel for leisure. Quite a feat, considering humans don't have any wings. Like all advanced technology we have at our disposal today, flying is also taken for granted. In the early days, however, just getting a few feet off the ground for a couple of seconds was considered a triumph. Like human pioneering flight, nature also had to experiment a lot before flying creatures could evolve. One newly discovered dinosaur species fits well into this story. Unearthed in 160 million year old sediments in China, this queer dinosaur strangely had bat-like wings. It's uncertain however if it was able to fly or even glide, owing to the degraded state of the fossil records. One thing's for sure, it makes the evolution of flight much more interesting to study.
Just like Pluto, the iconic dinosaur genus was demoted decades ago and classified under another sauropod genus. But a more sophisticated taxonomy recently published by researchers in the UK and Portugal warrants a revisit of the shelved, but never forgotten Brontosaurus.
Long before T-rex claimed the top dog spot among terrestrial predators, a vicious crocodile ancestor that walked on its hind legs was at the top of the food chain during the Triassic. The fossils of the Carnufex carolinensis, also known as the the “Carolina Butcher,” were discovered decades ago in the Pekin Formation, a geological formation in North Carolina's Chatham County. It was only recently that researchers reanalyzed the fossils and concluded they were dealing with an all new predator that roamed the Earth several million years before dinosaurs were even around.
Paleontologists diving beneath the surface of a water-filled cave in Madagascar made a monumental find: a graveyard filled with the bones of a wide variety of species,some very rare, other extinct for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Some of the remains that dot the bottom of the Aven Cave in Tsimanampetsotse National Park include those of the extinct elephant bird, a flightless giant similar to an ostrich, but most bones belong to the long-lost giant lemurs.
Based on fossil evidence and genome analysis, scientists know that the two groups diverged from a common ancestor around 420 million years ago, but we've yet to find actual fossil of it. Things are shaping up though after paleontologists have identified an Early Devonian fish from Siberia, approximately 415 million years old, which bears features of both classes.
It’s very small and incredibly old – scientists have found the egg of a 240 million year old parasite – a pinworm, to be more precise. It’s the oldest pinworm ever found, and one of the oldest evidences of parasitism ever found. The pinworm, also known as threadworm, is a parasitic intestinal worm, pretty common […]
Dr Nick Longrich from Bath University was studying bones from two horned dinosaurs from the ceratopsian family (related to Triceratops), when he discovered that the two were actually previously unknown species. The findings highlight that dinosaurs in area were more diverse than previously thought, and they also show that sometimes, museum archives can yield surprising information. “We […]
It was about as big as T-Rex, but not quite as fit – new fossils have revealed that Deinocheirus mirificus had quite a beer belly. “This is an entirely new body plan” for such dinosaurs, says Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Indeed, few scientists would have imagined such a scientific appearance. The […]
Paleontologists have identified the first known animals that used internal fertilization instead of spawning – armor-coated swimmers, called antiarchs, which lived around 385 million years ago in lakes in what is now Scotland. The discovery is truly monumental since its the earliest known example of sexual dimorphism or differences in appearance between the sexes in the […]
Scientists have discovered a new dinosaur that possibly had the largest nose in prehistory. Ironically, it didn't have a keen sense of smell.
Talk about a comeback! An international group of scientists report they’ve encountered evidence that suggests a long lost marine animal whose lineage can be traced back hundreds of millions of years ago and which was thought extinct for the past 4 million years is actually alive and well. The findings were made in Picton, New […]
Corals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, but even before them, 550 million years ago, animals were building reefs. A new study has found that Cloudina, the first animals to have hard shells built reefs too. Cloudina lived towards the end of the Ediacaran period – the last geological period of the Proterozoic Eon, immediately […]
Researchers have discovered the earliest evidence of a bird pollinator visiting flowers, presumably to feed on the nectar – if true, this means that bird pollinator/plants interactions were already taking place 47 million years ago. When you think about pollinators, you mostly think about bees or butterflies – but birds are significant pollinators too. Birds, particularly […]
Some 65 million years ago an asteroid impact caused countless species of land, marine and plant life to become extinct, including the mighty dinosaur which dominated the planet for millions of years. Not all species of the dinosaur group vanished, however. You’ve guess right: birds! Now, a new study sheds light on why birds were […]
Fossils that capture a kinetic moment are truly fascinating because they surprise a scene or picture from millions of years ago, effectively acting as a time capsule. Paleontologists have found along the years all sorts of such scenes, be them dinosaurs engaged in battle before an unlikely event engulfed and preserved them or some other […]
Crossing the riverbed of Carrizo Creek in Oklahoma, a series of tracks made by a two-legged dinosaur have been preserved in time for 150 million years. The tracks reveal a most clumsy scene, as the dinosaur in question slipped for a second before going back to his beaten path. When first analyzedin the 1980s, paleontologists […]
A giant platypus fossil, measuring more than 1m long (3ft) was discovered in Queensland, Australia. The animal lived 5-15 million years ago, as paleontologists explain in the journal Vertebrate Paleontology. Until now, the oldest fossil was dated 100.000 years ago. As if the evolutionary status of the platypus wasn’t extraordinarily complicated as it is, this […]
Looking close at suspicious marks and cuts present in the skulls of saber-tooth like cats which roamed North America millions of years ago, paleontologist Clint Boyd of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology found what he believes are clear signs that the animals used to ambush and kill their own kind. Fierce predators native […]
A lot of complex organisms, be them long extinct like dinosaurs or still alive like mammals, present what can only be referred to as a face – a symmetrical arrangement on the head of the animal of eyes, nose and, most importantly, jaw and cheek-bones. Human are particularly adapted to recognizing faces. Thanks to our […]
Paleontologists have scratched the surface of what appears to be a very promising dinosaur site near the Arctic circle, in Alaska. When these dinosaurs roamed the Earth, they stepped in mud; their footprints quickly filled with sand, and were preserved in the form we see them today, like blubs with toes. In July, the scientists […]
Instead of digging through layers of rocks, a few paleontologists focused their efforts on ‘digging’ through museum collection instead – and their efforts were quite successful. Their unique approach led to the discovery of never-before seen structures, which they think are something called dino-fuzz. The fluffy structures trapped in the small bits of ancient amber […]
When the Sahara comes to mind, lush greenery and gorgeous, fast flowing waters might be the last scenery that crosses you. Not too long ago (geological frame), however, the region known today as the Sahara may have been crossed by three giant rivers the size of the Nile, according to a recent palaeohydrological model made […]
Though built in 1933, the Fossil Cabin near the dinosaur graveyard at Como Bluff is, in a way, the oldest building in the world: the walls of the building were built out of 5,796 mortared-together dinosaur bones, dug from nearby areas. Initially, the building was part of a gasoline filling station along US 30 by […]
