When most of us think of dinosaurs, we envision large, lumbering beasts, but these giants shared their ecosystems with much smaller dinosaurs, the smaller skeletons of which were generally less likely to be preserved. The fossilized egg shells of these small dinosaurs can shed light on this lost ecological diversity.
 

A new study led by researchers from the University of Bristol has shown that not all saber-tooths were fearsome predators.

Sturgeon, a long-lived, bottom-dwelling fish, are often described as "living fossils," owing to the fact that their form has remained relatively constant, despite hundreds of millions of years of evolution.

Morphological landmarks used in morphometric analysis of chasmosaurine parietals.

By analyzing the fossilized jaw mechanics of reptiles who lived in the Severn Channel region of the UK 200-million-years ago, researchers from the University of Bristol have shown that they weren't picky about the types of insects they ate—enjoying both crunchy and less crunchy varieties.

North America had the T. rex, South America had the Giganotosaurus and Africa the Spinosaurus—now evidence shows Australia had gigantic predatory dinosaurs.

In 2011, Chilean scientists discovered a mysterious fossil in Antarctica that looked like a deflated football. For nearly a decade, the specimen sat unlabeled and unstudied in the collections of Chile’s National Museum of Natural History, with scientists identifying it only by its sci-fi movie-inspired nickname – “The Thing.”

Four members of this newly described plant-eater were found together in what may be Australia’s first known dinosaur herd.

Scientific illustrator Julius Csotonyi’s dramatic images of dinosaurs resonate in troubled times.

An international research team has been stunned to discover that some species of ancient crocodiles walked on their two hind legs like dinosaurs and measured over three meters in length.

20 new lion genomes give fresh perspectives on relationships between extinct and living populations of the king of beasts.

Fossilized remains of a new species of dinosaur that lived 90 million years ago have been discovered in Patagonia, Argentine paleontologists announced on Thursday.

Three-dimensional virtual reconstruction of the braincase of the ankylosaur Bissektipelta archibaldi. Bones are semi-transparent and the internal contents of the endocranial cavity are seen. 

 the growth of Tyrannosaurus rex has received repeated attention through quantitative analyses of relative maturity and chronological age. 

Archaeologists found the bones of about 60 mammoths at an airport construction site at Mexico city

A dinosaur with impressive armored plates across its back became mummified around 110 million years ago after enjoying one last meal before dying.

The giant extinct invertebrate Arthropleura resembled some modern millipedes, but could grow to be more than one-and-a-half feet wide, and may sometimes have been more than six feet long.

A 246 million-year-old extinct marine reptile that died with its unborn offspring still in its womb has been identified as a new species. 

A new genus and species of jeholornithiform avialan that lived during the Cretaceous period has been identified from a nearly-complete specimen found in China.

A fossil of a species of prehistoric reptile, previously found in China and Brazil, has been discovered in the UK for the first time, a university said.

For these Jurassic predators, cannibalism was 'definitely on the table' in desperate times, researchers say.

We think of crocodiles as fearsome predators, but it wasn’t always so. During the dinosaur era, many crocodile-like reptiles were peaceful plant-eaters. The strategy evolved on at least three separate occasions and seems to have been both common and successful.

New simulations from Imperial College London have revealed the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs struck Earth at the 'deadliest possible' angle.

hen a team of biologists melted some Siberian permafrost to look for microbes, an ancient survivor waved hello.

On University of Tennessee microbiologist Tatiana Vishnivetskaya’s petri dish sat a small pile of nematodes — half-millimeter long roundworms 

Dinosaur fossils aren't minerals under state law, a divided Montana Supreme Court said in a ruling Wednesday that has implications in an ongoing legal battle over the ownership of millions of dollars of fossils unearthed on an eastern Montana ranch.

Scientists from the University of Bristol and the University of Zurich have shown that the Titanichthys - a giant armoured fish that lived in the seas and oceans of the late Devonian period 380-million-years ago—fed in a similar manner to modern day basking sharks.

Skeleton high on a London museum wall — mostly ignored for a century — spurs a study finding that the creatures swam in seas from England to Russia to the Arctic, Baylor University researcher says

When people first arrived in what is now Queensland, they would have found the land inhabited by massive animals including goannas six metres long and kangaroos twice as tall as a human.

Elephants ranged over Schöningen in Lower Saxony 300,000 years ago. In recent years, remains of at least ten elephants have been found at the Palaeolithic sites situated on the edges of the former opencast lignite mine. 

A dinosaur relative of T. rex and Velociraptor with an unusually long neck, and which may have transitioned from predator to plant-eater as it reached adulthood, has been unearthed in Victoria.

Galeaspids are an endemic clade of jawless stem-gnathostomes known as ostracoderms. Their existence illuminates how specific characteristics developed in jawed vertebrates. Sinogaleaspids are of particular interest among the galeaspids but their monophyly is controversial because little is known about Sinogaleaspis xikengensis. 

Researchers in Argentina have uncovered the fossilised remains of a lethal ‘megaraptor’ species more agile than the T-rex.

In the age of giant reptiles, sauropods were the biggest of all. Long-tailed, long-necked species like Diplodocus and Apatosaurus were the largest dinosaurs. From tip to tail, some sauropods were up to 40 metres long.

Scientists have discovered the remains of two ancient fish that sported fanged teeth on their lower jaws and a huge, single saber tooth on the top. 

Scientists worldwide have long debated our ability to identify male and female dinosaurs. Now, research led by Queen Mary University of London has shown that despite previous claims of success, it's very difficult to spot differences between the sexes.

An ancient squid-like creature with 10 arms covered in hooks had just crushed the skull of its prey in a vicious attack when disaster struck, killing both predator and prey, according to a Jurassic period fossil of the duo found on the southern coast of England.

A new study by an international team from the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas and Hokkaido University and Okayama University of Science in Japan further explores the proliferation of the most commonly occurring duck-billed dinosaur of the ancient Arctic as the genus Edmontosaurus. The findings also reinforce that the hadrosaurs—known as the "caribou of the Cretaceous"—had a huge geographical distribution of approximately 60 degrees of latitude, spanning the North American West from Alaska to Colorado.

A new University of Wisconsin Oshkosh analysis of raptor teeth published in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology shows that Velociraptors and their kin likely did not hunt in big, coordinated packs like dogs.

Ankylosauria from Mexico and Their Phylogenetic Significance

n 1983, fossil hunter William Walker uncovered a giant claw in a brick pit in Surrey. A team of palaeontologists from the Museum began to investigate the site and had soon dug up one of the most complete meat-eating dinosaurs ever found in the UK.

A cat-sized mammal dubbed "crazy beast" lived on Madagascar among some of the last dinosaurs to walk the Earth, scientists have revealed.

An exuberant dinosaur with a parrot-like beak, bony frills, a huge horn on its nose and a 'star-like' skull has been named in honour of British rock musician David Bowie.

US palaeontologists have given the dinosaur genus the name Stellasaurus, meaning 'star lizard', based on a fossilised skull found in Montana. 

The creature roamed the badlands of Montana 75 million years ago and belonged to the ceratopsians – plant-eaters that included the iconic Triceratops 

Spinosaurous just got a little weirder. A new discovery shows large extensions of the tail vertebrae making this animals tail perfectly suited for the water!   

Brontosaurus was a large sauropod, a group of typically large dinosaurs with long necks and long tails. It lived during the Late Jurassic Period, from about 156 to 145 million years ago.

100 million years ago, ferocious predators, including flying reptiles and crocodile-like hunters, made the Sahara the most dangerous place on Earth.

About 75 million years ago, southern Alberta was a lush and warm coastal floodplain rich in plant and animal life, similar to Louisiana’s environment today. New isotopic evidence suggests large herbivores in this system co-existed in the same habitats, contrary to earlier hypotheses that some stuck to coasts and others to inland forests.

“Giant pliosaurids

The great size of certain Late Jurassic and Lower Cretaceous pliosaurids has made them famous, perhaps especially so in the UK and Australia where giant animals are particularly well represented.

Sauropods were among the most diverse lineages of dinosaurs, with an ample geographic distribution throughout the Mesozoic. This evolutionary success is largely attributed to neck elongation and its impact on feeding efficiency. However, how neck elongation influenced exactly on feeding strategies is subject of debate.

New discoveries have raised the possibility of exploring dino genetics, but controversy surrounds the results

Pterosaurs were the largest animals ever to fly. They soared the skies for 160 million years—much longer than any species of modern bird. Despite their aeronautic excellence, these ancient flyers have largely been overlooked in the pursuit of bioinspired flight technologies. 

Observations of temporal overlap of niche occupation among Late Cretaceous marine amniotes suggest that the rise and diversification of mosasauroid squamates might have been influenced by competition with or disappearance of some plesiosaur taxa. 

A specimen of the ceratopsian Protoceratops andrewsi (AMNH 6418) similarly had possible impressions that were destroyed. It was collected at the famous Bayn Dzak (“Flaming Cliffs”) locality by the 2nd Central Asiatic Expedition in 1923. 

Dinosaur bones are precious, especially when they come filled with Gemstones.

The oldest known fossils of dinosaur embryos have been examined in "unprecedented" detail to reveal how their skulls developed, according to a new study published Thursday.

Birds do it, bees do it, even ancient long-legged flies did it…

At least this pair did — until they were suffocated in a glob of tree resin around 40 million years ago.

Marine crocodiles of Germany

In our new paper we describe the fragmentary remains of two large individuals (SMNS 80149, PSHME PH1) of marine crocodiles (Thalattosuchia) from the early Kimmeridgian of Southern Germany. Germany is (next to e.g. the UK, France, or Argentina) one of the hotspots for fossils of these extinct crocodile relatives. Most of the well-preserved thalattosuchian skeletons found here are from the Toarcian black shales of Holzmaden, Dotternhausen, and Mistelgau as well as the late Upper Jurassic limestones of the Altmühl valley, Wattendorf, and Nusplingen. 

A new carcharodontosaurid taxon, Lajasvenator ascheriae gen. et sp. nov. is described. The new taxon is based on two specimens: MLL-PV-Pv-005 is a partial skeleton represented by a portion of the snout, partially articulated presacral vertebral series, four articulated caudal vertebra and fragments of the pelvic girdle; MLL-PV-Pv-007 includes the anterior ends of both dentaries, a quadratojugal, and fragments of cervical vertebrae, ribs and a possible tarsal bone. Lajasvenator is unique in having anterior projections on cervical prezygapophyses, lip-like crests on the lateral surfaces of cervical postzygapophyses, and bilobed anterior processes on cervical ribs. 

You wait ages for a pterosaur and then four come along at once.

Hot on the heels of a recent paper discovering three new species of pterosaur, University of Portsmouth palaeobiologists have identified another new species—the first of its kind to be found on African soil.

Experts say new evidence from Cretaceous period ‘shows us what carbon dioxide can do’

This underwater cave in Madagascar is home to what is thought to be the country's largest fossil graveyard.

Scientists have formally given an ancient reptile a name, over 80 years since its fossils were found in Tanzania.

Mandasuchus tanyauchen was a carnivorous reptile that lived around 245 million years ago and grew up to three metres in length. Mandasuchus was not a dinosaur - it was on the evolutionary branch of the reptile family tree that ultimately led to modern-day crocodiles. 

Small-bodied enantiornithine (robust, cranially forked pygostyle, distal condyles of tibiotarsus contacting medially, J-shaped metatarsal I, metatarsal IV mediolaterally reduced relative to metatarsals III and IV, metatarsal IV trochlea reduced to single condyle; Supplementary Note 1) with the following autapomorphies: pubis delicate and strongly curved so that the caudal margin is concave throughout; distal end of ischium dorsally curved.

A new feathered dinosaur that lived in New Mexico 67 million years ago is one of the last known surviving raptor species, according to a new publication in the journal Scientific Reports.

A team led by UC Riverside geologists has discovered the first ancestor on the family tree that contains most familiar animals today, including humans.

If you like teeth, underwater predators, and strange things, then this news is for you: Shark fans can celebrate the discovery of two new rare species of six-gilled sawsharks found in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar and Zanzibar.

New research finds soot from global fires ignited by an asteroid impact could have blocked sunlight long enough to drive the mass extinction that killed most life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.

A topic of considerable interest to paleontologists is how dinosaur-dominated ecosystems were structured, how dinosaurs and co-occurring animals were distributed across the landscape, how they interacted with one another, and how these systems compared to ecosystems today. 

A fantastic fossil found in Belgium is offering new insights into the ancient birds that gave rise to the ones still around today.

An ancient Elpistostege fish fossil found in Miguasha, Canada has revealed new insights into how the human hand evolved from fish fins.

Finding out the sex of a dinosaur might seem a little pointless, but it could teach us a lot about how these ancient animals lived.

Around 25,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers used the bones from 60 mammoths to build a large circular structure in Russia.

Grapefruit-sized tracks are first evidence that iconic dinosaurs roamed Scotland

The little bird-like dinosaur Oculudentavis khaungraae probably dined on insects in a Cretaceous rainforest.

Dr. Femke Holwerda has joined the Royal Tyrrell Museum research team as the Dr. Elizabeth Nicholls Postdoctoral Fellow. In this role, Dr. Holwerda will research the diet of mosasaurs from the Bearpaw Formation.

BEER STEIN-SHAPED DISTANT RELATIVE OF MODERN CLAMS CAPTURED SNAPSHOTS OF HOT DAYS IN THE LATE CRETACEOUS

The horse had arthritis when it died. It is possible, too, that it had bone cancer in one ankle.

That can happen to any horse once it gets to be a certain age. This one is nearly 16,000 years old.

The lower Permian (Cisuralian) was a time of major diversification for herbivorous tetrapods. Although tetrapod herbivores first appeared in the late Carboniferous (diadectomorphs and edaphosaurid synapsids), these groups increased in richness in the Permian and were joined by a novel array of herbivorous reptile groups (Sues & Reisz, 1998). 

A new species of quail-sized fossil bird from 44 million year old sediments in Utah fills in a gap in the fossil record of the early extinct relatives of chickens and turkeys, and it shows strong links with other extinct species from Namibia in Southern Africa and Uzbekistan in Central Asia.

An international research group led by Prof. Wang Bo from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (NIGPAS) has found a new genus, including two new aneuretopsychid species from early Late Cretaceous (99 million years ago) Burmese amber, which reveals new anatomically significant details of the elongate mouthpart elements.

Tiny skull belonged to the earliest relative of weasels ever found in North America

The team from the West Australian Museum had only been on the ground for five minutes when they made their first fossil discovery.

It was a tooth from a Carcharocles megalodon, a giant predatory shark that roamed the ocean until its extinction about 3.5 million years ago.

The exhibit, which opens this summer, will feature models and fossils of ancient creatures.

This study is lead by Dr. Alida Bailleul (Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Dr. Mary Schweitzer (North Carolina State University, NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Lund University and Museum of the Rockies).

The tiny forefoot of a lizard of the genus Anolis was trapped in amber about 15 to 20 million years ago. Every detail of this rare fossil is visible under the microscope. But the seemingly very good condition is deceptive:

An ancient worm that lived 518 million years ago has been identified as the first animal to evolve the loss of a body part no longer needed.

A marsupial lion that, in its heyday, would have had some animals "shaking in their boots", has been confirmed as a new genus.

The bones are currently preserved inside an 18,000-pound sandstone block discovered in 2001 by a graduate student conducting field work in Arches National Park. On Wednesday the block was relocated from the Thanksgiving Point Museum of Ancient Life to the Utah Geological Survey’s Research Center in Salt Lake City.

Billion-year-old fossil seaweeds found in China could be the ancestors of all land plants. The tiny seaweeds have branching structures and disc-shaped features to fix them to rocks, making them the oldest complex plants yet discovered.

Rodrigo Müller was working a block of rock and dirt at the base of Agudo Hill, an hour from Porto Alegre, when he first saw an unusual set of osteoderms, bony deposits that form plates on the skin of a reptile or amphibian.

A farmer has found the 20,000-year-old remains of four prehistoric armadillos that grew to the size of a car at the bottom of a dried-out riverbed.

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A fossilised insect wing discovered in an abandoned mine in Labrador has led palaeontologists from McGill University and the University of Gda?sk to identify a new hairy cicada species that lived around 100 million years ago.

A frozen bird was found on the ground in Siberia in 2018, but it had been there much longer than the latest snowfall. The bird is actually about 46,000 years old and was well-preserved in Siberian permafrost, scientists have determined.

Brachiosaurus remains rarely appear in the fossil record—but also worried. The humerus “was lying in what looked like loose dirt, actually sitting in a little fan of sediment cascading down into the gulch,” writes paleontologist Matt Wedel in a blog post. “We knew we needed to get it out before the winter rains came and destroyed it.”

The world’s oldest salamander has been unearthed in Siberia. It lived 167 million years ago would have swum with ocean beasts of the Jurassic era such as monster sharks or giant sea lizards and scorpions.

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The orthoceratoid Endoceras is the both the longest extinct cephalopod and largest Paleozoic invertebrate. A shell of E. giganteum (MCZ unnumbered) from the Late Ordovician of New York is the current record-holding specimen. 

Palaeontologists have created the first 3D reconstruction of the tough scales of a prehistoric reptile that 'overlapped like roof tiles'.

The UK team used CT scans to map the tough body armour of an aetosaur, a prehistoric reptile that lived 225 million years ago, based on Scottish fossils.

A team of scientists led by Elizabeth Boatman at the University of Wisconsin Stout used infrared and X-ray imaging and spectromicroscopy performed at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) to demonstrate how soft tissue structures may be preserved in dinosaur bones—countering the long-standing scientific dogma that protein-based body parts cannot survive more than 1 million years.

Tucked beneath Guyot Hall is a collection of oddities dating from the Cambrian period to the Holocene. It includes hundreds of fossils, minerals, and even entire preserved pieces of coral. The collection’s history is almost as interesting as the items it contains.

The mystery surrounding dinosaur footprints on a cave ceiling in Central Queensland has been solved after more than a half a century.

The Neovenator - which literally translates as 'new hunter' - was a carnivorous dinosaur that was about 7.6 metres long and could weigh up to two tonnes.

An analysis of fossil eggshells may have settled a long-running debate about dinosaurs, suggesting that all species were warm-blooded.

This also means the ancestors of dinosaurs must have been warm-blooded too, says Robin Dawson at Yale University, who led the research.

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Evidence of a new carnivorous dinosaur species has been unearthed in Argentina, and was dubbed by researchers as the ‘thunder reptile’.

The tropical region of South America is one of the world’s hot spots when it comes to animal diversity. The region’s extinct fauna is unique, as documented by fossils of giant rodents and crocodylians — including crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and gavials — that inhabited what is today a desert area in Venezuela. Five to ten million years ago, this was a humid swampy region teeming with life. One of its inhabitants was Stupendemys geographicus, a turtle species first described in the mid-1970s.

Beetle parasites clinging to a primitive bee 100 million years ago may have caused the flight error that, while deadly for the insect, is a boon for science today.

Since pterosaur fossils were first discovered more than two centuries ago, scientists have lacked proof of how early members of this group of flying reptiles, from the Triassic or Jurassic periods, walked on land. But now the first known footprints of such pterosaurs, discovered in southern France, are overturning suggestions that they were sprawling or clumsy walkers that struggled when earthbound—or that they strolled on their hind legs like birds.

A group of researchers from the Tel Aviv University identified a benign tumor called LCH (Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis) in the fossilized tale of a 'duck-billed dinosaur.’

paleontologists are uncovering tyrannosaurs at a fast and furious pace. The classic Tyrannosaurus rex may remain the most famous of all, but, in the last year alone, experts have described the bones of pipsqueaks that were far from the top of the food chain, leggy predators that lived in the shadow of other carnivorous giants, and short-snouted species that stalked the floodplains of the ancient west over 10 million years before the tyrant lizard king itself.

Mammals today give birth to relatively few offspring with larger brains than other vertebrate species. However, this strategy wasn’t always popular. According to a new study performed at the University of Texas, a mammalian precursor no bigger than a small dog would give birth to as many as 38 babies at a time.

Scientists at the University of Alaska Fairbanks have identified a new species of thalattosaur, a marine reptile that lived more than 200 million years ago.

Sixty-six million years ago, in the emerged lands of Laurasia -now the northern hemisphere- a primitive land tortoise, measuring about 60 cm, managed to survive the event that killed the dinosaurs. It was the only one to do so in this area of the world, according to a Spanish palaeontologist who has analysed its peculiar fossils, found in France.

About 99 million years ago in what’s now Myanmar, sap suddenly trapped a tiny juvenile frog with a beetle, perhaps its intended next meal. Unlucky for the frog, but lucky for science.

The skeleton of a reptile that roamed Earth 230 million years ago and crushed the bones of its prey has been found in Brazil.

The terrifying 7ft-long creature, an ancestor of the crocodile, was the “T-Rex of its time”, according to researchers.

Researchers have uncovered the remnants of a huge, fossilized shark head in the walls of a cave in Kentucky.

The remains of the ancient animal are located in Mammoth Cave National Park, which is home to the longest known cave system on Earth—one that extends for more than 400 miles, according to the National Park Service.

Last May I was out in the Salt Wash member of the Morrison Formation with Brian Engh and Thuat Tran, for just a couple of days of prospecting. We’d had crappy weather, with rain and lots of gnats. But temperatures were cooler than usual, and we were able to push farther south in our field area than ever before. We found a small canyon that had bone coming out all over, and as I was logging another specimen in my field book, I heard Brian shout from a few meters away: “Hey Matt, I think you better get over here! If this is what I think it is…”

Two years ago, Emese M. Bordy, a sedimentologist at the University of Cape Town, was flipping through an obscure dissertation from the 1960s when a clue leapt out at her. It was an image of a footprint on a farm located on the northern Karoo Basin of South Africa.

They were the largest animals to ever walk the Earth: sauropods, a dinosaur clade of such immense size and stature, they're sometimes dubbed 'thunder lizards'.

VERTEBRAE from the tail of a 125-million-year-old dinosaur has been exposed at cliffs near Brighstone.

A tooth embedded in a squid fossil tells a story of a battle at sea with the flying reptile

A remarkable new species of meat-eating dinosaur has been unveiled at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Paleontologists unearthed the first specimen in early 1990s in Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah. The huge carnivore inhabited the flood plains of western North America during the Late Jurassic Period, between 157-152 million years ago, making it the geologically oldest species of Allosaurus, predating the more well-known state fossil of Utah, Allosaurus fragilis. The newly named dinosaur Allosaurus jimmadseni, was announced today (January 24, 2020) in the open-access scientific journal PeerJ.

Palaeoloxodon is an extinct genus of straight-tusked elephants that lived throughout Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene and Holocene. It migrated out of Africa about 800,000 years ago and divided into many species, with distinct species in Japan, Central Asia and Europe, and even dwarf species on some Mediterranean islands. A new study, published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, enhances our understanding of all these Palaeoloxodon species.

The first evidence of crocodile-like phytosaurs from southern Africa shows that the animals were far more widely distributed than previously thought.

Did the chicks of dinosaurs from the group oviraptorid hatch from their eggs at the same time? This question can be answered by the length and arrangement of the embryo's bones, which provide information about the stage of development. 

A 120 million-year-old fossil is helping paleontologists bridge the 'phantom' evolutionary leap between feathered dinosaurs and modern birds.

Dubbed "the dancing dragon", or Wulong bohaiensis, this newly described species is a strange mix between bird and dinosaur, ancient and new.

New insights into how microbial life was quickly re-established following the mass extinction of the dinosaurs have been detailed for the first time by Curtin University-led research.

Fossils hint that families of the hulking animals could have gathered at an Ice Age waterhole.

Modern birds can trace their origins to theropods, a branch of mostly meat-eaters on the dinosaur family tree.

About 310 million years ago some sharks had saws for jaws – and now we know how one of those sharks, called Edestus, fed. The “saw blade” in its lower jaw glided backwards and forwards like the blade on some modern power tools, allowing the shark to cut through soft prey like fish.
 

Nestled in Alberta’s badlands, the Royal Tyrrell Museum houses some of the world’s most incredible fossils of prehistoric life.

A 437-million-year old scorpion was the earliest known creature to venture from sea onto land, a new study has found, shedding new light on one of the earliest chapters in the planet's evolutionary history.

Reconstructing color patterns in feathered dinosaurs

A new study provides our first glimpse of fossil feathers near the South Pole.

At the San Diego Natural History Museum, a visitor might find paleontologist Ashley Poust firing up a tiny jackhammer. He uses to chip away rock surrounding a fossil.

"Even though it looks scary vibrating at that speed, it wouldn’t hurt you unless you really stuck yourself with it," Poust said.

Poust is familiar with digging up, cleaning and analyzing fossils. So, when he looked at a fossil found by a farmer in China over a decade ago, he could tell it had the remains of a new species of dinosaur.

ossilization is a fairly rare occurrence to start with. Most lives that ever have been lived left no record of their existence or passing. So when paleontologists come across dense pockets of bone, representing not just one animal but many, how such an ancient treasure trove was assembled is one of the core threads that we can pull on to unravel the mystery of a time long gone. So it is with a massive accumulation of sloths found in Santa Elena, Ecuador.

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Paleontologists from the University of Missouri have discovered the well-preserved digestive tracts in the fossils of microscopic animals called cloudinomorphs. The worm-like animals lived during the Ediacaran period, some 550 million years ago.

The functional morphology of sauropod dinosaur long necks has been studied extensively, with virtual approaches yielding results that are difficult to obtain with actual fossils, due to their extreme fragility and size. However, analyses on virtual fossils have been questioned on several of their premises, such as the ability to accurately reconstruct intervertebral tissue with only skeletal data; or whether zygapophyseal overlap can be used to determine the limits of range of motion, since some extreme neck poses in extant giraffes have been claimed not to retain any zygapophyseal overlap.

Another Megaraphorid has been unearthed and classified in Australia making it the remains of the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever discovered in Australian history

A mummified dinosaur has skin so well preserved that the remains of blood vessels and pigment can be seen, and analysis of the pigment suggests that the animal had dark grey skin. However, it is possible that the dinosaur’s skin contained other pigments that haven’t been preserved.

A 3D model of the restoration of Triceratops skull No. 21, which the Peabody traded to the Delft University Geological Museum in the 1950s. The restoration is underway in the Netherlands. (Photo credit: Javid Jooshesh, Naturalis)

A student from the University of California has made the discovery of a lifetime on a recent exhibition in the North Dakota Badlands.

Parts of Alberta are libraries of Earth’s history, treasure troves of fossils from animals that lived millions of years ago. But sometimes, an especially rare gem is found.

 new study published by paleontologists Matthew M. Canoy Illies and Denver Fowler, on Jan.7, examines the kinked tail of “Larry” the Triceratops, a fossilized dinosaur on display in a new exhibit at the Badlands Dinosaur Museum in Dickinson. The investigation sheds light on the animal’s behavior and answers crucial questions about its overall ecology and habits.

What did Triceratops smell like?

Bones have given us an osteological outline of what the famous “three-horned face” looked like. Skin impressions and colors of related animals have offered some possibilities about saurian fashion, too. But, if we were able to travel back 67 million years, what scent would waft away from the hefty herbivore? Would it smell like a barnyard? Like nothing at all? Would the dinosaur carry a whiff of… frill cheese?

An old shark of 91 million years was found near a ranch located in Mitchell County, recently described as Cretodus houghtonorum.

The pterosaur is the first known vertebrate to have obtained the ability of powered flight. The hyoid apparatus of the pterosaur shows a simplification similar to that in birds, in which the muscles play an important role in feeding and respiration. The elaboration of the hyoid in pterosaurs is largely unknown because preserved fossils are rare despite widespread descriptions of them

About 790,000 years ago, a meteor slammed into Earth with such force that the explosion blanketed about 10% of the planet with shiny black lumps of rocky debris. Known as tektites, these glassy blobs of melted terrestrial rock were strewn from Indochina to eastern Antarctica and from the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific. For more than a century, scientists searched for evidence of the impact that created these pitted blobs. 

The ability to run fast and far was not enough to save dinosaurs from firestorms.

Why did we take so long to invent civilization? Modern Homo sapiens first evolved roughly 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. But initial steps towards civilization—harvesting, then domestication of crop plants—began only around 10,000 years ago, with the first civilizations appearing 6,400 years ago.

Sixty-six million years ago, the ground of western North America trembled with the footfalls of a tyrant: Tyrannosaurus rex. But despite a wealth of T. rex remains pulled from the region’s Cretaceous-period rocks, scientists have had few clues about how the celebrity dinosaur grew from a hatchling to a gargantuan predator—until now.

It’s hard to imagine what life must have been like 250 million years ago. We’re talking about a time even before dinosaurs, when beasts known as erythrosuchids ruled and roamed the Earth freely. Although erythrosuchids never walked among dinos, the two are distant cousins.

A new species of Stegasaurus has been uncovered in Morocco and has been described by researchers as the oldest Stegosaur ever uncovered.

A comic 66 million years in the making.

“It’s a big honkin’ animal.” That’s how College of Charleston paleontologist Scott Persons describes the fossil that happens to share his name. “Scotty,” named for a celebratory bottle of scotch cracked open to toast its discovery, is the biggest Tyrannosaurus rex in the fossil record — and the most elderly.

Fossil hunters say they have unearthed the earliest evidence yet of four-limbed vertebrates looking after their young, after discovering the entwined remains of two lizard-like creatures preserved in an ancient plant stump.

Millions of years before the arrival of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex, another fearsome dinosaur—the Gnathovorax—roamed what is now southern Brazil, ripping apart its prey with sharp teeth.

A peculiar species of ancient ape that has posed an evolutionary puzzle for decades could not walk on two legs like early hominins—but it also couldn't climb trees like other prehistoric primates, scientists have discovered.

Smaller than a sparrow, a 99-million-year-old bird preserved in amber made some very big news in July.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, or even close,” says paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor of Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology. O’Connor is a co-first author on the Current Biology paper that introduced the world to Elektorornis chenguangi, a new species of Cretaceous bird known from a single partial specimen.

Earlier this year, a remarkable new fossil specimen was unearthed in the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of China by area fossil hunters—possibly a huge ancient spider species, as yet unknown to science.

We report the first Jurassic remains that can confidently be referred to a megalosaurine theropod in Uruguay and Tanzania. This identification is sustained on a detailed morphological study. The large size of both teeth 

New fossil data show that our fishy ancestors may have risen to dominance by becoming predators of their ancient jawless cousins.

An ancient crocodile species that weighed up to three tonnes and was as long as a bus had an extra hip bone and upright shoulders, say researchers.

The differences in its body compared to modern crocodylians allowed it to move its 'vast bulk' in river and swamp habitats as well as across land, experts fond. 

An international team, led by palaeontologists in Zurich, have been examining the fossil records of early giant crocodylian species to discover how they moved.

dog walker has claimed he discovered a 65 million-year-old skeleton on a Somerset beach after his sharp-nosed dogs sniffed it out. 

A unique fossil that is "literally a black piece of coal" found in the dump of a 19th-century coal mine is revealing new insights about life before the rise of dinosaurs. It has also unseated a fossil found by a P.E.I. boy as the oldest known species of an ancient group called the "parareptiles."

Paleontologists have announced the discovery of a new genus and species of extinct protocetid whale, based on the fossilized remains found in the Western Desert of Egypt. Named Aegicetus gehennae, the ancient animal represents an important step in the evolution of whale locomotion.