fossils
Embark on a journey through one of the most profound ecological transitions in the history of complex life.
Each year, several trillion pounds of microscopic silicon-based skeletons fall down the water column to pile up into siliceous ooze.
Meet your new flying nightmare: Thapunngaka shawi.
Evolution repeatedly hit upon this solution simply because it works.
2022 was another busy year in the realm of science, with groundbreaking stories spanning space, materials, medicine, and technology.
De-extinction, if it is ever possible, will not be simple.
The spikes in their mouths would have helped them catch squid or fish.
Cooperation was the first technology.
Tracing the origin and development of jaws — and other anatomical features that humans share — sheds some light on how we came to be.
There were many other species of human on the planet. Svante Pääbo discovered one of them.
Was our distant ancestor a biped or not – i.e., human or not human?
Sex can be a death trap even for modern toad and frog species.
The 557-million-year-old specimen challenges the theory that animal body plans were laid out in the Cambrian explosion.
Human beings are descendants of these early tetrapods – at least those who made a new life on land.
Horses pranced around the western hemisphere until they went extinct in the late Holocene. They were reintroduced by European colonists — though where, when, and how has remained unclear.
Mammals have a history stretching back 325 million years. To study that ancient history is to know our own origins.
Predatory dinosaurs with big skulls tend to have tiny arms. Researchers propose there might be a direct link between those traits.
New research finds that dinosaurs were already adapted to living in cold climates before the end-Triassic mass extinction. But how?
Fossils of Australopithecus in a South African cave are one million years older than previously thought. This challenges the consensus that humans first evolved in East Africa.
Yorkicystis lived during the “Cambrian explosion,” 539 million to 485 million years ago – hundreds of million years before the dinosaurs.
It’s not about leaves in tall trees.
The long-standing debate over whether dinosaurs were more like birds or lizards is drawing to a close.
The “Clovis First” hypothesis for human settlement of North and South America has just been debunked. Where do we go from here?
Scientists across a range of disciplines have helped solve Darwin’s dilemma.
The way that the ancient Megalodon adapted to water temperature has important implications for modern marine creatures.
From crocodiles to birds, certain animals managed to survive some of the worst extinction events in world history.
