1+ week, 5+ day ago  (815+ words) Spinosaurs have sometimes been portrayed as swimmers or divers, but a new species of these dinosaurs bolsters the idea that they were more like gigantic herons The lifestyle of spinosaurs has been a contentious topic among palaeontologists, due to the…...

1+ mon, 6+ day ago  (831+ words) A treasure trove of Cambrian fossils has been discovered in southern China, providing a window on marine life shortly after Earth's first mass extinction event An artist's illustration of life in Earth's oceans at the time of the Huayuan biotaDinghua…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago  (620+ words) Long thought to have walked bipedally, like us, Australia's extinct giant kangaroos have features that indicate they could also have bounced Procoptodon goliah was 2 metres tall, but it might have hopped Even the giant kangaroos that roamed Australia thousands of…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago  (656+ words) A fossil discovery in northern Ethiopia expands the known range of Paranthropus, a genus of strong-jawed hominins that lived around 2 million years ago, and suggests they lived in a range of habitats Illustration of Paranthropus hominins, which lived between 2.7 and…...

1+ mon, 1+ week ago  (946+ words) Extraordinary fossils of 518-million-year-old jawless fish, among the earliest known vertebrates, appear to show that these animals had two pairs of eyes Illustration of Haikouichthys, a fish from the Cambrian period, with a second pair of eyes suggested by fossil…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (585+ words) Hallucigenia was such an odd animal that palaeontologists reconstructed it upside-down when they first analysed its fossils - and now we may know what it ate Hallucigenia, one of the strangest animals of all timeAlamy One of the weirdest animals that…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (657+ words) A piece of woolly rhinoceros flesh hidden inside a wolf that died 14,400 years ago has yielded genetic information that improves our understanding of why one of the most iconic megafauna species of the last glacial period went extinct The woolly…...

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (662+ words) An analysis of growth rings in the leg bones of 17 Tyrannosaurus rex individuals reveals that the dinosaurs matured much more slowly than previously thought, and adds to the evidence that they weren't all one species Tyrannosaurus rex was a late…...

1+ mon, 4+ week ago  (732+ words) The jawbones and vertebrae of a hominin that lived 773,000 years ago have been found in North Africa and could represent a common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans The jawbone of an ancient hominin found at Grotte " Hominid's in…...

2+ mon, 1+ day ago  (875+ words) Did Sahelanthropus, which lived 7 million years ago, walk on two legs like a modern human? It's complicated Sahelanthropus fossils (centre) compared with a chimpanzee (left) and a human (right)Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv0130 Wiliams et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv0130 A…...