A new New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics paper out today describes the 266 fossil species as one of the richest and most diverse groups of three-million-year-old fauna ever found in New Zealand.
The discovery that birds evolved from small carnivorous dinosaurs of the Late Jurassic was made possible by recently discovered fossils of theropods such as Tyrannosaurus rex and the smaller velociraptors. In a way, you could say that dinosaurs are still with us and seen tweeting from your own backyard! Below are the latest research headlines in the Birds channel on Newswise.
The apex predators that roamed the earth 230 million years ago had a much weaker bite than previously thought, and likely couldn’t crunch through bone to consume the entirety of their kills.
An extremely rare collection of 160-million-year-old sea spider fossils from Southern France are closely related to living species, unlike older fossils of their kind.
University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists have discovered and documented the largest known single dinosaur track site in Alaska. The site, located in Denali National Park and Preserve, has been dubbed “The Coliseum” by researchers.
An international research team details changes in DNA that researchers found are shared by humans and other mammals throughout history and are associated with life span and numerous other traits.
Paleoclimate evidence shows that around 1.1 million years ago, the southern European climate cooled significantly and likely caused an extinction of early humans on the continent, according to a new study led by UCL researchers.
A remarkable new fossil from China reveals for the first time that a group of reptiles were already using whale-like filter feeding 250 million years ago.
Canadian vertebrate palaeontologist, Aaron Kilmury, and a team of researchers from the University of Manitoba have published new research in PeerJ Life and Environment, unveiling the first-ever formal description of microvertebrate fossil assemblages from the late Cenomanian to middle Turonian periods in Manitoba, Canada.
Researchers from the Hessian State Museum Darmstadt and the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center Frankfurt have uncovered the factors that determine the enormous diversity of herbivorous insects.
In a new study published in JMIRx Bio, one of JMIR Publications’ new overlay journals, scientist Floe Foxon explores whether the Loch Ness Monster, a creature in Scottish folklore, could be a giant eel. Using previous estimates of the monster’s size to predict the probability of encountering a large eel of a similar size, the study found that giant eels could not account for sightings of larger animals in Loch Ness, a freshwater lake in the Scottish Highlands.
A new 145-million-year-old pterosaur (extinct flying reptiles that lived alongside the dinosaurs) was named today by a team of British, American and German researchers.
A new study reveals the iconic extinct Megalodon, or ‘megatooth shark’, was a rather slow cruiser that used its warm-bloodedness to facilitate digestion and absorption of nutrients.
What would a traveler from the future think if one day s/he could analyze the rocks that are currently forming on the planet? Surely, this person would find quite a few plastic fragments and wonder why this material was so abundant in rocks of a certain age on Earth.
Biomechanical studies on the arachnid-like front “legs” of an extinct apex predator show that the 2-foot (60-centimeter) marine animal Anomalocaris canadensis was likely much weaker than once assumed. One of the largest animals to live during the Cambrian, it was probably agile and fast, darting after soft prey in the open water rather than pursuing hard-shelled creatures on the ocean floor.
A team led by scientists at The University of Texas at Austin has filled a major gap in the state’s fossil record – describing the first known Jurassic vertebrate fossils in Texas.
A study led by the University of Oxford has brought us one step closer to solving a mystery that has puzzled naturalists since Charles Darwin: when did animals first appear in the history of Earth?
From the 20-foot-long jawbones of the filter-feeding blue whale to the short, but bone-crushing, jaws of the hyena and the delicate chin bones of a human, the pair of lower jawbones characteristic of mammals have evolved with amazing variation.