3+ hour, 53+ min ago   (368+ words) In a recent study, evolution gets even messier than usual. The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop. The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved into wildly…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago   (319+ words) Current amphibian development may not have been typical of early land vertebrates. The lack of a tadpole phase so early in life suggested there was no metamorphosis in this animal’s life cycle, which led Pardo and Mann to hypothesize the…...

3+ mon, 2+ week ago   (389+ words) Layer by layer, researchers revealed the jaws of an ancient predator. Some 80 million years ago, the late Cretaceous oceans were patrolled by 17-meter mosasaurs, long-necked plesiosaurs, and massive, predatory sharks. For decades, the paleontological consensus was that this was the…...

5+ mon, 2+ week ago   (354+ words) Like rocks, egg shells can trap isotopes, allowing us to use them to date samples. When dinosaur fossils surface at a site, it is often not possible to tell how many millions of years ago their bones were buried. While…...

11+ mon, 2+ week ago   (290+ words) A species known only by a single rib turns out to be covered with meter-long spikes. And we have known for sure that the armor was around back then, given that we’ve found the skin-derived osteoderms that comprise the armor…...

5+ mon, 2+ week ago   (618+ words) The revised age may help make sense of 2-million-year-old stone tools elsewhere in China. Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren’t ancestors of Denisovans after all; they’re actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia. (Side note:…...

4+ mon, 1+ week ago   (587+ words) Ars Technica The details of how animal life began are a bit murky. Most of the groups familiar today are present in the Cambrian, a period when they rapidly diversified, with familiar features evolving alongside bizarre creatures with no obvious…...

8+ mon, 4+ week ago   (41+ words) Most reporting on a splashy publication like this get feedback from multiple uninvolved scientists (for example, by sharing an embargoed version of the scientific publication with experts for comments... Wyoming dinosaur mummies give us a new view of duck-billed species...

5+ mon, 4+ day ago   (482+ words) Small size seems to have come before a change in diet for a tiny dinosaur lineage. The dinosaur he and his colleagues found, however, did not look like a specialized ant-eater. The fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis was unearthed from the…...

5+ mon, 5+ day ago   (296+ words) A unique head spike and fish-eating jaws help make sense of these dinosaurs. The Spinosaurus is a sail-backed, crocodile-snouted dinosaur that Hollywood depicted as a giant terrestrial predator capable of taking down a T. rex in Jurassic Park 3. Then they changed…...