3+ hour, 30+ min ago  (764+ words) Modern birds owe much of their agility in the air to their short, lightweight tails. But scientists have long debated exactly how that tail evolved from the long, bony tails of their dinosaur ancestors. A new study has now answered…...

3+ day, 3+ hour ago  (893+ words) A new study has found that the stone points scattered among mammoth bones across Ice Age North America cannot prove the Clovis people who left them were hunters rather than scavengers. A carcass butchered after a kill and one stripped…...

3+ day, 3+ hour ago  (788+ words) Mammals inherited a changing world after the dinosaurs disappeared, about 66 million years ago. As forests recovered and climates shifted, mammals spread into habitats that had long been dominated by giant reptiles. Although there is fossil evidence from early mammals in…...

1+ week, 5+ min ago  (908+ words) Big brains are wildly expensive to run. Brain tissue burns energy at roughly 20 times the rate of ordinary body tissue, so evolving a larger brain is never a casual evolutionary step. For decades, one idea tried to explain how primates…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago  (990+ words) Fossils usually preserve one thing well: bone. Soft tissues like skin almost always disappear long before scientists find the remains, leaving researchers to guess what an ancient animal looked like on the outside. That's why a small crocodile fossil from…...

1+ week, 2+ day ago  (808+ words) Most fossils hand us bones and little else. A rare few preserve something far more delicate than that. More than 300 million years ago, a minnow-sized fish sank into the muck of a prehistoric swamp near Trawden, a village in Lancashire…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago  (848+ words) Freshwater mussels don't look like attentive parents. They wedge themselves into riverbeds and filter water for years, easy to mistake for ordinary stones. Yet the females shelter their developing young inside their own gills before sending them off. That kind…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago  (933+ words) For more than a century, the story of how animals first walked on land followed a tidy script. Fish gave rise to amphibian-like creatures, and those creatures eventually led to reptiles and mammals. That script for tetrapod evolution included a…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago  (806+ words) A fossilized wing bone from a flying reptile that died 113 million years ago has been preserved in extraordinary condition. The bone retained its three-dimensional structure and even contains chemical traces that offer clues about what the animal ate. The secret…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago  (780+ words) Fossils are usually the hard leftovers of a life. A bone, a tooth, the chalky shell of a creature that once sat on an ancient seabed. Crinoid tube feet are nothing like that. They are soft, water-filled stalks, the kind…...