Feature Channels: Paleontology

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Over the last several months, a certain bird – believed to be a sacred ibis – has been drawing a lot of attention, and covering a lot of ground, at Cornell University.

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Over the two decades paleontologist Kevin Padian taught a freshman seminar called The Age of Dinosaurs, one question asked frequently by undergraduates stuck with him: Why are the arms of Tyrannosaurus rex so ridiculously short?

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Spinosaurus is the largest predatory dinosaur known - over two metres longer than the longest Tyrannosaurus rex - but the way it hunted has been a subject of debate for decades. In a new paper, published today in Nature, a group of palaeontologists have taken a different approach to decipher the lifestyle of long-extinct creatures: examining the density of their bones.

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Lacewings (Neuroptera) are small predatory insects, whose larvae are sometimes used as pest control agents in agriculture. Few non-specialists, however, know that some lacewings can look a lot like praying mantises.

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Researchers led by the University of Bristol show that the earliest jaws in the fossil record were caught in a trade-off between maximising their strength and their speed.

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The fossil, housed in The Nat’s paleontology collection, offers a window into what the Earth was like during the Eocene Period, more than 40 million years ago.

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Danish and Swedish researchers have dated the enormous Hiawatha impact crater, a 31 km-wide meteorite crater buried under a kilometer of Greenlandic ice.

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Don't miss these articles in our Staff Picks channel

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A new study reveals that the iconic extinct Megalodon or megatooth shark grew to larger sizes in cooler environments than in warmer areas.

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Relatively small, but fearsome-looking stegosaur measured about 2.8 metres (9 feet) from nose to tail—but scientists can’t tell whether the remains are those of an adult or juvenile.

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A new study reveals that the iconic extinct Megalodon or megatooth shark grew to larger sizes in cooler environments than in warmer areas. DePaul University paleobiology professor Kenshu Shimada and coauthors take a renewed look through time and space at the body size patterns of Otodus megalodon, the fossil shark that lived nearly worldwide roughly 3.6 million to 15 million years ago. The new study appears in the international journal Historical Biology.

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Geologists at Lund University in Sweden have mapped 300 years of research on the prehistoric marine reptiles known as ichthyosaurs.

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The asteroid which killed nearly all of the dinosaurs struck Earth during springtime. This conclusion was drawn by an international team of researchers after having examined thin sections, high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scans, and carbon isotope records of the bones of fishes that died less than 60 minutes after the asteroid impacted.

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Approximately 80 miles from the westernmost reach of China’s Great Wall, paleontologists found relics of an even more ancient world. Over the last two decades, teams of researchers unearthed more than 100 specimens of fossil birds that lived approximately 120 million years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs.

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A set of Triassic archosaur fossils, excavated in the 1960s in Tanzania, have been formally recognised as a distinct species, representing one of the earliest-known members of the crocodile evolutionary lineage.

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A new scientific study shows that all previously proposed body forms of the gigantic Megalodon, or megatooth shark, which lived nearly worldwide roughly 15-3.6 million years ago, remain in the realm of speculations.

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Researchers in Japan, Sweden, and the US have unearthed evidence that low volcanic temperatures led to the fourth mass extinction, enabling dinosaurs to flourish during the Jurassic period.

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A new article published today in PLOS ONE by a Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU)’s Institute of Archaeology team and colleagues focused on the remains of a previously submerged fisher-hunter-gatherer camp on the shores of the Sea of Galilee from around 23,000 years ago.