1+ hour, 15+ min ago   (507+ words) Scientists have identified a giant new dinosaur from Brazil that reached about 20 meters long and lived 120 million years ago. Its surprising evolutionary ties to a Spanish dinosaur suggest its ancestors crossed ancient land connections between Europe, Africa, and South America....

1+ hour, 59+ min ago   (109+ words) The extinct “American cheetah” was not really a cheetah at all, but a puma relative with an unexpectedly flexible lifestyle. Fossils from the Yukon suggest northern populations survived partly by eating fish, possibly including salmon, while southern cats hunted on…...

5+ day, 46+ min ago   (1115+ words) At first glance, stromatolites and their close relatives, microbial mats, can look like little more than dark, ancient rocks. In reality, they are densely packed, layered communities built by microbes. Billions of years ago, before animals and plants existed, stromatolites…...

6+ day, 35+ min ago   (490+ words) A meter-long scorpion with massive pincers stalked ancient Britain 415 million years ago, long before forests and the better-known age of giant insects. Its surprising size and possible semi-aquatic lifestyle could reshape ideas about how early arthropods became giants....

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (521+ words) Wild monkeys in West Africa can climb vertical tree trunks using foot flexibility scientists did not realize they possessed. The discovery challenges a key assumption about what the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees looked like and how it…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (819+ words) A remarkable set of fossil footprints from northern Kenya is offering scientists a rare glimpse of how an extinct human relative may have moved and interacted about 1.4 million years ago. The tracks, preserved near an ancient lakeshore, appear to record…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (325+ words) DNA from a nearly 190-year-old museum specimen has helped scientists confirm a distinct Himalayan pangolin species hiding in plain sight in Nepal and northern India. The discovery could give conservationists a powerful new way to trace illegally traded pangolin scales…...

2+ week, 5+ hour ago   (521+ words) A sweeping analysis of thousands of animal genomes suggests that chromosomes do not evolve randomly but instead follow a limited number of irreversible “evolutionary highways.” These one-way genetic changes preserve clues to more than 600 million years of animal history and…...

2+ week, 1+ day ago   (491+ words) Scientists have identified a new species of lizard living in the high mountain forests of western Thailand. The species, Acanthosaura syrax, takes its name from Syrax, the dragon ridden by Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen in House of the Dragon. Acanthosaura syrax…...

2+ week, 4+ day ago   (881+ words) More than 450 million years ago, long before dinosaurs appeared and before animals or plants had spread widely across dry land, crinoids were already thriving in some of Earth's earliest coral reefs. These ancient relatives of starfish looked somewhat like flowers…...