1+ hour, 27+ min ago  (182+ words) It's a butthole. It's functional. It's unglamorous. It's also a weirdly useful clue about how early reptiles were built. That's why the potential cloaca imprint is the star. Near the base of the tail, the fossil shows a narrow slit-like…...

2+ week, 7+ hour ago  (222+ words) Was this basically a giant porcupine? For a while, we thought dinosaurs were pretty much just huge scaly lizards. And then we found evidence of fossilized feathers, which altered our image of many species from oversized iguanas to nightmarish bird…...

2+ week, 3+ day ago  (341+ words) Life, uh, finds a way. The asteroid that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs has sort of been viewed as nature's ultimate reset button. Sixty-six million years ago, Chicxulub hit, the lights went out, and around three-quarters of life on Earth…...

1+ mon, 55+ min ago  (262+ words) These kangaroo behemoths, covered in muscles, were theoretically roughly as springy as modern-day kangaroos. Kangaroos and jumping go hand in hand. But that wasn't always the case. During the Pleistocene era, which spanned roughly 2.6 million years ago to only about…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (368+ words) Get unlimited access to everything VICE has to offer. A new study published in Nature reinforces the idea that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. This is based on a set of fossils unearthed in a Moroccan cave that date to…...

2+ mon, 5+ day ago  (438+ words) More than 5,000 years ago, bees in the Caribbean nested inside dead animals. They built their brood chambers in the hollow teeth and vertebrae of rodents buried in a cave. According to a new study published in Royal Society Open Science,…...

2+ mon, 1+ week ago  (355+ words) Tens of millions of years before the megalodon, a massive shark was running the oceans. According to new research, a previously overlooked set of fossils found near Darwin, Australia, belonged to the earliest known mega-predatory shark in the modern shark…...

2+ mon, 2+ week ago  (385+ words) A team of US and Bolivian researchers has revealed that the Carreras Pampa archaeological dig site in Bolivia's Torotoro National Park is the single largest dinosaur track site ever discovered. How many individual prints have to be at the site…...

4+ mon, 3+ week ago  (401+ words) 437 million years ago, the Midwestern suburb now known as Waukesha County, Wisconsin, was a tropical coastline. It was teeming with trilobites, early scorpions, and other prehistoric creatures. It was the Silurian period, an era that may have been the birthplace…...

4+ mon, 3+ week ago  (381+ words) Hidden in the eastern Andes, scientists stumbled on a marsupial that had never been described before. It's small, reddish-brown, and wears a natural bandit mask across its face. The animal, now named Marmosa chachapoya, is the newest member of the…...