Fossil footprints found in an Australian coal mine around 50 years ago have long been thought to be that of a large ‘raptor-like’ predatory dinosaur, but scientists have in fact discovered they were instead left by a timid long-necked herbivore.
Discovery provides new insights into the evolution of crabs and when they spread around the world.
Sudden burst of evolution 66 million years ago expanded snake diets and put vertebrates on the menu.
Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine report new evidence that some 5,000 years ago, a sloth smaller than a black bear roamed the forest floor of what is now the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean Sea, living a lowland life different from its cousins on the other side of the island.
Palaeobiologists have unearthed the earliest evidence yet of hippos in the UK.
“Throw me the idol; I’ll throw you the whip!” - From Raiders of the Lost Ark
An international research team has found an eye system in trilobites of the suborder Phacopina from the Devonian (390 million years B.P.) that is unique in the animal kingdom: each of the about 200 lenses of a hyper-facet eye spans a group of six normal compound-eye-facets, forming a compound eye itself.
A new study led by palaeontologists at the University of Southampton suggests that bones found on the Isle of Wight belong to two new species of spinosaurid, a group of predatory theropod dinosaurs closely related to the giant Spinosaurus.
A team of scientists from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and from the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature (STM) has isolated exquisitely preserved cartilage cells in a 125-million-year-old dinosaur from Northeast China that contain nuclei with remnants of organic molecules and chromatin.
A team of paleontologists from the University of Washington excavated four dinosaurs in northeastern Montana this summer. The four dinosaur fossils are: the ilium of an ostrich-sized theropod; the hips and legs of a duck-billed dinosaur; a pelvis and limbs from another theropod; and a Triceratops specimen.
Researchers from the Universities of Tübingen and Zaragoza have discovered a previously unknown species of otter from 11.4-million-year-old strata at the Hammerschmiede fossil site.
Ancient humans could do some impressive things with elephant bones.
There’s been an age-old question going back to Darwin’s time about the relationships among the world’s five living rhinoceros species.
In a paper published August 23, authors Cameron Pahl and Luis Ruedas, of Portland State University, show that Allosaurus, a large carnivorous dinosaur from the Jurassic that has long been thought to be a top predator, could probably have acquired most of its calories by scavenging on the carcasses of enormous sauropod herbivores that lived alongside it.
Tyrannosaurus rex was not just a huge beast with a big bite, it had nerve sensors in the very tips of its jaw enabling it to better detect – and eat – its prey, a new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Historical Biology today finds.
Exquisitely preserved fossils left behind by creatures living more than half a billion years ago reveal in great detail identical structures that researchers have long hypothesized must have contributed to the archetypal brain that has been inherited by all arthropods.
Expert Q&A: Do breakthrough cases mean we will soon need COVID boosters? The extremely contagious Delta variant continues to spread, prompting mask mandates, proof of vaccination, and other measures. Media invited to ask the experts about these and related topics.
Among the fierce carnivores that lived during the late Cretaceous was a predator named Daspletosaurus.
Research published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Systematic Palaeontology describes the discovery of three new species of ancient creatures from the dawn of modern mammals, and hints at rapid evolution immediately after the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
A joint Sino-Brazilian research team led by Dr. WANG Xiaolin from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has reported new dinosaur fossils from the Early Cretaceous Hami Pterosaur Fauna.
An international research team has retraced the astonishing lifetime journey of an Arctic woolly mammoth, which covered enough of the Alaska landscape during its 28 years to almost circle the Earth twice.
Australia’s largest flying reptile has been uncovered, a pterosaur with an estimated seven-metre wingspan that soared like a dragon above the ancient, vast inland sea once covering much of outback Queensland.
Researchers from the University of Bristol and University College London have used cutting-edge techniques to digitally reconstruct the skull of one of the earliest limbed animals.
Florida State University researchers have found that the extinction at the end of the Permian period coincided with a sudden spike and subsequent drop in the ocean’s oxygen content. Their findings were published in Nature Geoscience.
Newly-hatched pterosaurs may have been able to fly but their flying abilities may have been different from adult pterosaurs, according to a new study. Researchers found that hatchling humerus bones were stronger than those of many adult pterosaurs, indicating that they would have been strong enough for flight.
Researchers took 3-D printed reconstructions of fossil cephalopods to actual water tanks (including a swimming pool) to see how their shell structure may have been tied to their movement and lifestyle.
A new paper appearing in Biology Letters describes the oldest-known fragmentary bat fossils from Asia, pushing back the evolutionary record for bats on that continent to the dawn of the Eocene and boosting the possibility that the bat family's "mysterious" origins someday might be traced to Asia.
A Case Western Reserve University researcher is leading an interdisciplinary global team that will use state-of-the-art technology to tackle an ancient question: How did ecological factors affect the evolution of our ancestors millions of years ago? The possible answers so intrigued the W. M. Keck Foundation that it awarded Armington Professor Beverly Saylor and her colleagues a $1.2 million grant to explore them.
Dinosaurs were generally huge, but a new study of the unusual alvarezsaurs show that they reduced in size about 100 million years ago when they became specialised ant-eaters.
The tiny beetle Triamyxa coprolithica is the first-ever insect to be described from fossil faeces. The animal the researchers have to thank for the excellent preservation was probably the dinosaur ancestor Silesaurus opolensis, which 230 million years ago ingested the small beetle in large numbers.
Elephants and their forebears were pushed into wipeout by waves of extreme global environmental change, rather than overhunting by early humans, according to new research.
A near-perfectly preserved ancient human fossil known as the Harbin cranium sits in the Geoscience Museum in Hebei GEO University. The largest of known Homo skulls, scientists now say this skull represents a newly discovered human species named Homo longi or "Dragon Man." Their findings, appearing in three papers publishing June 25 in the journal The Innovation, suggest that the Homo longi lineage may be our closest relatives--and has the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution.
A beetle bores a tree trunk to build a gallery in the wood in order to protect its lay. As it digs the tunnel, it spreads ambrosia fungal spores that will feed the larvae.
The ancient Maya city of Tikal was a bustling metropolis and home to tens of thousands of people.
Associate professor Laura Wasylenki co-authored a new paper in Nature Communications that presents the results of nickel isotope analyses on Late Permian sedimentary rocks. The results demonstrate the power of nickel isotope analyses, which are relatively new, to solve long-standing problems in the geosciences.
New UMD study suggests that everywhere tyrannosaurs rose to dominance, their juveniles took over the ecological role of medium-sized carnivores
Footprints from at least six different species of dinosaur - the very last dinosaurs to walk on UK soil 110 million years ago - have been found in Kent, a new report has announced.
The old cousins of the common woodlice were crawling on Irish land as long as 360 million years ago, according to new analysis of a fossil found in Kilkenny.
An international research team has described a new species of Oculudentavis, providing further evidence that the animal first identified as a hummingbird-sized dinosaur was actually a lizard.
Russian paleontologists discovered the skull of a Pleistocene small cave bear with artificial damage in the Imanay Cave (Bashkiria, Russia).
Coral insights into 1,000 years of seasonal changes in the Arabian Sea warn of significant impacts caused by global warming.
Jack Tseng loves bone-crunching animals -- hyenas are his favorite -- so when paleontologist Joseph Peterson discovered fossilized dinosaur bones that had teeth marks from a juvenile Tyrannosaurus rex, Tseng decided to try to replicate the bite marks and measure how hard those kids could actually chomp down.
A large group of iconic fossils widely believed to shed light on the origins of many of Earth’s animals and the communities they lived in may be hiding a secret. Scientists are the first to model how exceptionally well preserved fossils that record the largest and most intense burst of evolution ever seen could have been moved by mudflows.
Since its discovery in the 1960s, the Jebel Sahaba cemetery (Nile Valley, Sudan), 13 millennia old, was considered to be one of the oldest testimonies to prehistoric warfare.
A strange phenomenon happens with modern blue whales, humpback whales and gray whales: they have teeth in the womb but are born toothless.
Researchers at the University of Washington have discovered the first fossil evidence of an ancient amphibian, Micropholis stowi, from Antarctica. Micropholis lived in the Early Triassic, shortly after Earth's largest mass extinction. It was previously known only from fossils in South Africa.
The last ice age ended almost 12 000 years ago in Norway. The land rebounded slowly as the weight of the ice disappeared and the land uplift caused many bays to become narrower and form lakes.
The evolution of herbivores is linked to the plants that survived and adapted after the ‘great dying’, when over 90% of the world’s species were wiped out 252 million years ago.
Researchers report the discovery of several sets of fossilized tracks, likely from the brown bear-sized Coryphodon, that represent the earliest known evidence of mammals gathering near an ocean.
The evolution of ankle and foot bones into different shapes and sizes helped mammals adapt and thrive after the extinction of the dinosaurs, a study suggests.
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