News
289-million-year-old mummified reptile reveals how bodies evolved to breath and move
3+ hour, 54+ min ago (729+ words) The 289-million-year-old reptile Captorhinus in its death pose in a cave system. Oil seepages, hyper-mineralized water, and fine clays in this cave made it an ideal environment for mummification and fossilization of soft tissues like skin, cartilage, and protein remnants....
Bite mechanics of ancient marine predators yields surprising results
5+ day, 5+ hour ago (873+ words) Engineering simulations of 16 Cretaceous marine reptile jaws show mosasaurs and polycotylid plesiosaurs had fundamentally different biting capabilities that allowed them to coexist. (CREDIT: Universit" de Li'ge / F. Della Giustina) The Western Interior Seaway, which existed roughly 80 million years ago, split North…...
Scientists are rethinking the origins of living apes
1+ week, 2+ day ago (420+ words) A jaw bone discovered in Egypt is changing the way scientists think about the origins of the ape family tree. The specimen, which is thought to be about 17 or 18 million years old, was found in the Wadi Moghra region of…...
Lion-sized armadillo, ancient tortoises: Ice Age creatures discovered in Central Texas
1+ week, 4+ day ago (493+ words) A paleontologist snorkeling an underground stream in Texas found Ice Age fossils never before seen in Central Texas. (CREDIT: Quaternary Research / AI-enhanced for aspect ratio) The floor of Bender's Cave looked like a graveyard. Fossils spread across the submerged stream…...
The hidden forest lizard that forced scientists to rethink reptile classification
2+ week, 3+ hour ago (738+ words) A slender reptile slips beneath damp leaf litter in Taiwan's mountain forests, rarely seen and often mistaken for a snake. For more than a century, scientists have argued over what, exactly, it is. That question has now been settled, at…...
Whale fossils reveal evidence of ancient shark attacks
2+ week, 5+ day ago (760+ words) A painted reconstruction of a bluntnose six-gill shark (or cow shark) scavenging on a tiny extinct right whale carcass during the Early Pliocene of the southern North Sea. (CREDIT: Alexander Lovegrove) A broken tooth lodged deep in bone can outlast…...
CT scans reveal a new species of baby dinosaur hidden in rock for 100 million years
2+ week, 6+ day ago (709+ words) An artist's interpretation of a juvenile Doolysaurus huhmini. It is depicted alongside birds and other dinosaurs that lived during the Cretaceous in what is now South Korea. (CREDIT: Jun Seong Yi) The specimen is small, the size of a turkey,…...
Evidence of an Ice Age forest emerges from the North Sea floor
4+ week, 8+ hour ago (1046+ words) Ancient DNA reveals forests grew in Doggerland 16, 000 years ago, far earlier than expected. (CREDIT: Walker et al. 2020) The North Sea is home to the remains of a vast land that has been lost to time and is referred to as…...
How ancient shorelines played a crucial role in the survival of early sea creatures
1+ mon, 4+ day ago (1066+ words) A Science study using 300, 000 fossils finds east-west coastlines trapped species at one latitude, raising extinctions over 540 million years. (CREDIT: Science) Coastlines can look like simple lines on a map. Over Earth's history, they acted more like gates and traps. A…...
New fossil findings help clarify the history of primate evolution
1+ mon, 5+ day ago (936+ words) Brooklyn College Professor Stephen Chester (center) points out dental features on an enlarged model of an extinct mammal to undergraduate research assistants (left to right) Aisha Amir, Aidan Smith, Todd Skahill, and Shruthika Srinivasan) at his lab on campus. (CREDIT:…...