1+ week, 3+ day ago  (437+ words) Once, long ago, a little reptile going about its business plopped itself down in the mud before getting up and carrying on with its day. Nearly 300 million years later, that brief rest has yielded the world's earliest known fossilized imprint…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago  (517+ words) Some dinosaurs were scaly, some were covered in bony plates of armor, and others were even feathered. But now paleontologists have discovered a new species with a type of skin covering that's never been seen in dinosaurs before: hollow spikes....

1+ week, 6+ day ago  (279+ words) A new Spinosaurus species has been unearthed from the Saharan desert, and its skull bears a magnificent crest never seen before on this kind of dinosaur. The discovery reveals more than just the dinosaur's beauty, however. Spinosaurus have mostly been…...

3+ week, 2+ day ago  (587+ words) Meet Tyrannoroter heberti, a newly described species that was one of the largest, most feared land animals of its time " at least, if you were a fern. Hailing from 307 million years ago, this strange tetrapod was among the earliest known…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago  (585+ words) Human-made ivory and stone tools have been found in a 14,000-year-old layer of Alaskan earth, providing evidence of some of the first people to inhabit the Americas. The tools resemble those made by people of the Clovis culture, which is…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago  (520+ words) Baby long-necked dinosaurs might have been the fast food of the Jurassic Period. A detailed food web of the time, reconstructed from fossil data, shows that the young not-yet-giants almost single-handedly supported predator populations of the area. With their elephantine…...

1+ mon, 3+ day ago  (710+ words) Modern mammals have unique hearing abilities, able to sense a broad range of volumes and frequencies using middle-ear features, including our eardrums and a few small bones. A new study from paleontologists at the University of Chicago in the US…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago  (788+ words) Just over half a billion years ago, Earth was rocked by a global mass extinction event, a dramatic interruption of the Cambrian explosion of life on Earth. What happened next, in the direct aftermath of this event, has mostly been…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago  (438+ words) The image of kangaroos hopping their way across the Australian outback is iconic " and it turns out it might have been an even more impressive sight during the Pleistocene. A new study by researchers from the Universities of Manchester and…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (649+ words) An international research team has announced the most complete fossil yet of Homo habilis (aka 'the handy man') " one of the earliest known members of our genus. The 2-million-year-old partial skeleton may even represent the oldest example of H. habilis discovered…...