News
A mouth built for efficiency may have helped the earliest bird fly
3+ hour, 51+ min ago (615+ words) The 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx had mouth features similar to those of birds today Fleshy "teeth" on the roof of Archaeopteryx's mouth, a sensory organ at the end of the beak and a highly mobile tongue (all illustrated) may have helped the…...
Evolution didn’t wait long after the dinosaurs died
6+ day, 3+ hour ago (690+ words) Marine ecosystems began recovering within just a few thousand years after the asteroid strike This artist's rendition depicts three forms of new plankton species (top left) and algae (middle left) that arose within a few thousand years after the Chicxulub…...
Fossilized vomit reveals 290-million-year-old predator’s diet
1+ week, 1+ day ago (401+ words) Regurgitated material contains the prey of a hunter that lived before the dinosaurs This illustration depicts the early Permian apex predator Dimetrodon teutonis regurgitating the remains of prey animals. Two smaller prey animals identified in the fossil vomit, Eudibamus cursoris…...
Queen bumblebees are poor foragers thanks to sparse tongue hair
1+ mon, 6+ day ago (288+ words) Dense, fine hairs on the tongues of bumblebees allow them to pick up nectar with each slurp A bumblebee worker (left) and a queen (right) drink a sugar solution in a laboratory. The larger queens are less efficient foragers, due…...
These fossil finds shed new light on the past in 2025
1+ mon, 2+ week ago (332+ words) New details emerged about Earth's most ancient bird, a penis worm (yes, we went there) and more What did a teenage T. rex look like? Not like Nanotyrannus, a relatively diminutive and distinct species. That's just one of this year's fun…...
Huge relatives of white sharks lived earlier than thought
2+ mon, 1+ week ago (315+ words) Eight meter-long "megapredator" sharks patrolled Australian seas 115 million years ago Eight-meter-long sharks (illustrated here) patrolled the sea that later became Darwin, Australia. The predators shared their ecosystem with huge reptilian marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs. Some 115 million years…...
Big Neandertal noses weren't made for cold
2+ mon, 2+ week ago (138+ words) The well-preserved nasal passages of a Neandertal skeleton are as narrow as our own The exceptionally well-preserved nasal cavity of this over 130,000 year old Neandertal skull wasn't specially adapted for cold and is similar to that of Homo sapiens, a…...
Nanotyrannus is still not a teenage T. rex
2+ mon, 2+ week ago (404+ words) Fossil throat bones tip the scales in the long-running debate A full-grown Nanotyrannus lancensis (illustrated, left) competes for food with a juvenile, feathered Tyrannosaurus rex (right), while an adult T. rex watches in the background. Let the record show: In 2025, one…...
Ancient southern Africans took genetic evolution in a new direction
2+ mon, 2+ week ago (314+ words) Their DNA is more varied than modern humans, including gene tweaks enhancing sun protection Ancient southern Africans, represented here by a skull dating to between about 82,000 and 170,000 years ago, evolved a unique set of gene variants over the past several…...
A foot fossil suggests a second early human relative lived alongside Lucy
2+ mon, 3+ week ago (678+ words) Bone fragments from Ethiopia show two human ancestors may have shared the same landscape A partial foot skeleton from 3.4 million years ago has been assigned to the early human relative'Australopithecus deyiremeda,'a species that was first named in 2015 and challenges…...