News
Digging up the past: Important dinosaur discoveries of the year
9+ hour ago (241+ words) [A pack of Nanotyrannus brazenly attacks a juvenile T. rex]Dinosaurs may be long extinct, but 2025 made it abundantly clear that they're anything but settled science. Over the past year, new fossils, reanalyses of famous specimens and the use of increasingly…...
'Prehistoric Times Square': 16,000 tracks uncover dinosaur traffic jam
3+ week, 1+ day ago (246+ words) The extent of an incredible dinosaur highway has been revealed in Bolivia, a country where actual skeletal fossils are rare. More than 16,000 footprints, along with tail impressions from creatures of all sizes, have been fully documented " and the scale of…...
Secretive 'no arm' lizard crowned new species after decade-long search
3+ week, 6+ day ago (259+ words) We'd like to welcome this curious armless burrowing lizard into the New Species Hall of Fame. Despite being built for life underground, in the end this slider skink was no match for scientists who had searched for a decade to…...
3.3-billion-year-old rocks reveal oldest chemical traces of life
4+ week, 11+ hour ago (453+ words) Earth's earliest life left behind very few chemical traces. Fragile remains, like ancient cells and microbial mats, were buried, squeezed, heated, and broken apart by the planet's shifting crust before reappearing at the surface. These drastic changes erased most traces…...
Case of mistaken identity rewrites T. rex – and dinosaur predator – history
1+ mon, 3+ week ago (474+ words) More than 60 million years on from its final day on Earth, there's a dinosaur we owe an apology. Paleontologists confirm that the Tyrannosaurus rex locked in combat with a Triceratops in the famous Dueling Dinosaurs specimen is not a T. rex…...
Ancient mammoth tooth reveals oldest known bacterial DNA
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (454+ words) Sequencing mammoth DNA has already helped scientists map out how these Ice Age giants evolved, migrated, and survived. But there's a hidden layer of history still waiting to be decoded " the microbes that lived inside them. While mammoth genomes tell…...
242-million-year-old reptile the oldest ancestor of lizards, snakes and tuatara
3+ mon, 1+ week ago (348+ words) A tiny skull found on a beach in Devon has rewritten the early history of lizards, snakes and the tuatara, the last survivor of an ancient reptile lineage found only in New Zealand today. The new species dates back 242 million…...
Ancient croc "hypercarnivore" ate dinosaurs for breakfast
3+ mon, 4+ week ago (211+ words) A remarkably intact skeleton of a giant meat-eating crocodile relative has been unearthed in South America, providing scientists with a vivid picture of its physiology and behavior when it roamed the land 70 million years ago, chasing down its prey " which…...
Dinosaur teeth reveal prehistoric air quality was pretty awful, actually
4+ mon, 2+ week ago (296+ words) Fossilized dinosaur teeth can reveal a lot more than just how these creatures ate and who they were related to " they can also tell us what the air was like in prehistoric times. As it turns out, humans might have…...
4,000-year-old teeth reveal just how long we've been getting high
4+ mon, 3+ week ago (380+ words) Traces of a psychoactive compound has been detected in the dental plaque of a Bronze Age woman buried in Thailand some 4,000 years ago, making it the earliest direct chemical evidence of humans chewing betel nut. It remains the world's fourth…...