Feature Channels: Paleontology

• share
• favorite_border

Millions of years ago, giant dwarf crocodiles roamed a part of Africa with a taste for our human ancestors.

• share
• favorite_border

A fossilized lower jaw has led an international team of palaeontologists, headed by Bastien Mennecart from the Natural History Museum Basel, to discover a new species of predator that once lived in Europe.

• share
• favorite_border

A group of researchers from CONICET and the University of Utah demonstrated that during the time of the first dinosaurs, variations in the diversity and abundance of the plant and vertebrate animal species cannot be related to the climatic changes recorded throughout its deposition, in contrast with previous hypotheses.

• share
• favorite_border

Research involving palaeontologists from the Universities of Portsmouth and Southampton has identified the remains of one of Europe’s largest ever land-based hunters: a dinosaur that measured over 10m long and lived around 125 million years ago.

• share
• favorite_border

Plesiosaurs, which lived about 210 million years ago, adapted to life underwater in a unique way: their front and hind legs evolved in the course of evolution to form four uniform, wing-like flippers.

• share
• favorite_border

Prior to the first world war, sprawling European empires collectively controlled roughly 80% of Earth’s landmass.

• share
• favorite_border

Megatooth sharks like, Otodus megalodon, more commonly known as megalodon, lived between 23 and 3.6 million years ago in oceans around the globe and possibly reached as large as 20 metres in length.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists have finally put to bed a long-standing question over the role of Earth’s orbit in driving global ice age cycles.

• share
• favorite_border

For decades, paleontologists have debated whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, like modern mammals and birds, or cold-blooded, like modern reptiles.

• share
• favorite_border

A group of paleontologists, included researchers from the Ural Federal University (UrFU), discovered the jaws of an Etruscan bear from the early Pleistocene period (2–1.5 million years ago) in the Taurida cave.

• share
• favorite_border

One of the most exciting moments of the new Jurassic Park sequel, Jurassic World Dominion, is when the Quetzalcoatlus swoops down from the sky and attacks the heroes’ aircraft.

• share
• favorite_border

Jars of tiny platypus and echidna specimens, collected in the late 1800s by the scientist William Caldwell, have been discovered in the stores of Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology.

• share
• favorite_border

Did the world’s largest prehistoric shark need an orthodontist, or did it just have a bad lunch?

• share
• favorite_border

From embryo to turtle cracker: a team led by palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher from the University of Vienna studied the multiple changes in tooth shape in the tiger shark. The study, recently published in the Journal of Anatomy, is also central in drawing conclusions about extinct species from the myriad of preserved shark teeth in the field of palaeontology.

• share
• favorite_border

A new study led by SMU paleontologist Anthony Fiorillo identifies the key role precipitation and temperature play in structuring vertebrate herbivore dinosaur populations in Alaska. The findings, which are published in the journal Geosciences, may also provide historical insights into the consequences of climate change.

• share
• favorite_border

Scientists at the University of Bristol have discovered that body size is more important than body shape in determining the energy economy of swimming for aquatic animals.

• share
• favorite_border

A geologic formation near Aix-en-Provence, France, is famed as one of the world’s chief treasure troves of fossil species from the Cenozoic Era. Since the late 1700s, scientists there have been unearthing amazingly well-preserved fossilized plants and animals.

• share
• favorite_border

Flying reptiles could change the colour of their feathers, research finds.

• share
• favorite_border

In Triceratops Traits, students work alongside paleontologists to solve an evolutionary mystery by analyzing and interpreting data from the fossil record under the premise that natural laws have operated the same throughout the history of life on Earth to fit 7th grade learning standards in Utah and 6th-8th grades around the U.S.