Feature Channels: Paleontology

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Missouri-based scientists unlock clues to predatory behavior, a significant factor in evolution.

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A team of Montana State University paleontologists have identified several new types of dinosaurs from fossil evidence discovered in eastern Idaho, demonstrating the presence of a much more diverse group of theropods in the area than was previously known.

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A single toe bone found on Ellesmere Island in the 1970s is described for the first time.

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Statistical analysis by University of Wyoming researchers shows wide variation in the rates at which the bones of ancient animals in the Americas have been lost.

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An international team of scientists have discovered two new plankton-eating fossil fish species of the genus called Rhinconichthys from the oceans of the Cretaceous Period, about 92 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the planet.

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Sorry, Explorers Club, but woolly mammoth is no longer on the menu. Neither is the giant ground sloth.

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The menu for the earliest inhabitants of the Australian Outback some 50,000 years ago may have included some very big omelets.

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Juvenile theropod possibly oldest known Jurassic dinosaur from UK.

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A new study led by the American Museum of Natural History links modern birds to a "feathered father" that lived in South America some 90 million years ago.

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LSU paleoclimatologist Kristine DeLong contributed to an international research breakthrough that sheds new light on how the tilt of the Earth affects the world's heaviest rainbelt. DeLong analyzed data from the past 282,000 years that shows, for the first time, a connection between the Earth's tilt called obliquity that shifts every 41,000 years, and the movement of a low pressure band of clouds that is the Earth's largest source of heat and moisture -- the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ.

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A 15 million year-old fossil sperm whale specimen from California belongs to a new genus, according to a study published December 9, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Alexandra Boersma and Nicholas Pyenson from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

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An international research partnership has discovered the first Mosasaur fossil of its kind to be found in Japan. Not only does the 72-million-year-old marine reptile fossil fill a biogeographical gap between the Middle East and the eastern Pacific, but also it holds new revelations because of its superior preservation.

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A new study by a team of scientists from Argentina, Brazil, California and the Natural History Museum of Utah at the University of Utah has determined that the time elapsed between the emergence of early dinosaur relatives and the origin of the first dinosaurs is much shorter than previously believed.

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UK researchers stumbled across several hundred dinosaur footprints in a coastal lagoon on the Isle of Skye, which they dated to the Middle Jurassic, 170 million years ago. The researchers, which include Stephen Brusatte from the University of Edinburgh, UK and his colleague Tom Challands, surmise that the footprints were left by sauropods, primitive cousins of the more famous Brontosaurus and Diplodocus. The largest of the footprints measure around 70 centimetres across, larger than those that would have been left by T. Rex. This find is the largest dinosaur site found in Scotland to date. The researchers report their findings in the Scottish Journal of Geology.

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Findings, recently published in the journal Science Advances, show that snakes did not lose their limbs in order to live in the sea, as has been previously suggested. The research led by scientists at the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences involves the analysis of a 90-year old reptilian fossil of Dinilysia patagonica, a 2-meter long reptile. Computed tomography (CT) scans of the bony inner ear of Dinilysia patagonica reveals how this ancestor to modern snakes became adept at burrowing.

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The sweet, juicy peaches we love today might have been a popular snack long before modern humans arrived on the scene. Scientists have found eight well-preserved fossilized peach endocarps, or pits, in southwest China dating back more than two and a half million years. Despite their age, the fossils appear nearly identical to modern peach pits.

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Using a computer model, scientists were able to show that Tribrachidium, a disc shaped seas creature that lived about 555-million-years ago, fed by collecting particles suspended in water. This is called suspension feeding and it had not previously been documented in organisms from this period of time.

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UK researchers have unearthed ancient fossil forests, thought to be partly responsible for one of the most dramatic shifts in the Earth’s climate in the past 400 million years.

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A Stony Brook University-led team of evolutionary biologists has discovered that the oldest known nectar-drinking bat fossil, Palynephyllum antimaster, was probably omnivorous.

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A UA researcher has provided the strongest evidence yet that it's possible for brains to fossilize and, in fact, a set of 520-million-year-old arthropod brains have done just that.

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In findings presented last week at the Meetings of the Society of Vertebrate Palaeontology in Texas, scientists identified the fossil remains of rats the size of small dogs found on the Indonesian island of Timor. According to archeological evidence from the area, humans (who were present in Timor starting at least 46,000 years ago) regularly hunted and butchered these megafauna.

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Pre-humans' shift toward a grass-based diet took place about 400,000 years earlier than experts previously thought, providing a clearer picture of a time of rapid change in conditions that shaped human evolution.

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You are what you eat, and that seems to have been true even 2 million years ago, when a group of pre-human relatives was swinging through the trees and racing across the savannas of South Africa.

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Researchers at Drexel University are bringing the latest technological advancements in 3-D printing to the study of ancient life. Using scale models of real fossils, for the first time, they will be able to test hypotheses about how dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals moved and lived in their environments.

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New discoveries in southern Utah "dinosaur boneyard" reveal giant horned plant-eaters, one with 15 horns, showing different species in same groupings existed at the same time.

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During the past 100 years, scientists have tossed around a great many hypotheses about the evolutionary route to bipedalism, and what inspired our prehuman ancestors to stand up straight and amble off on two feet.

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A Temple University geology graduate student has developed a new geochemical process that uses rare earth elements to assist scientists and paleontogologists in placing loose fossils back into the earth's strata from where it came or determining the legitimacy of a fossil.