Feathered dinosaur tail found preserved in amber.
BBC reports on a brown-and-white relic that reveals what dinosaurs really looked like – the first material from a dinosaur’s body ever discovered: “This is […]
paleontology
The 15,000-year-old Mexican mammoth trap.
ABC News (Australia) shares the findings of a Mexican expedition that has discovered a trove of mammoth bones in what appears to have been a […]
A new look at the mammals who lived with dinosaurs
Nature rounds up a “rash of fossil finds” revealing the lives of the first mammals, shedding a little more light on how our forebears survived […]
As Australopithecus to us, so this fossil to sharks.
Nature reveals the “missing link” for sharks, thanks to a cartilaginous fossil of a 383 million-year-old eel-like fish: Christian Klug at the University of Zurich […]
Science Art: Reconstruction on paper of Tyrannosaurus rex, from Bulletin of the AMNH, 1905 (Linda Hall Library).
Click to embiggen From the Linda Hall Library “Scientist of the Day” entry on Henry Fairfield Osborn: Osborn named and described some of the most […]
Skulls of the first Homo sapiens in Europe
Nature introduces us to the Greek ancestors of modern humanity – by far the oldest-known Homo sapiens, relatively recently discovered in a cave in southern […]
Bat-winged dinosaur bemuses paleontologists
We thought we were pretty clear on how dinosaurs gradually evolved into birds, developing longer fingers, stronger feathers, and all the rest of that. Now, […]
Science Art: Sinocalliopteryx gigas as a stealth hunter feeding on the primitive bird Confuciusornis, by Cheung Chungtat
Click to embiggen An Easter Sunday lunch is served: an early bird! This is the Chinese feathered dinosaur Sinocalliopteryx gigas, chomping the bird Confuciusornis – […]
Scientists discover a Peruvian four-legged whale – with “otter-like features”.
Science Daily has more on the creature named Peregocetus pacificus, which unfortunately hasn’t been around for a 42.6 million years, but was once a whale […]
China opens a window on life before the dinosaurs.
Science News describes a dizzying array of unknown animals from “the Cambrian explosion,” when life took a sudden turn for the weird and wonderful. The […]
Prehistoric dragon ate bones with its meat. And its own teeth.
LiveScience digs deep for a prehistoric prize, finding dietary clues about Smok wawelski – a peak predator who, thankfully, left modern scientists poop full of […]
Science Art: Styracosaurus, by Julio Lacerda
Click to embiggen I’ve always had a thing for these guys – the frills are so, well, *frilly*. I don’t usually picture them looking quite […]
New missing link: The ape that walked like we do.
The Leakey Foundation reveals what we know about the newest proto-human species to be given a name, Australopithecus sediba – and what these guys tell […]
Fuzzy little pterosaur.
Science Daily makes the leather-winged terrors of the Jurassic seem downright cuddly with research that indicates pterosaurs might, in fact, have been soft and cuddly: […]
We now know what killed everything in Earth’s worst mass-extinction event.
Science Alert lets us know that oceanographers have determined that the event that killed 70 percent of all land species and 96 percent of all […]