paleontology

Welcome to the world of bees. This fuzzy yellow and black striped fellow is a bumblebee in the genus Bombus sp., family Apidae. We know him from our gardens where we see them busily lapping up nectar and pollen from flowers with their ...

A remarkable set of fossil feathers revealed an unexpected pattern. Hidden within the ancient plumage was a clue that had remained unnoticed for 160 million years.

Fossils sealed between million-year-old volcanic ash layers reveal a lost North Island ecosystem that disappeared long before humans arrived.

Cradled within the soft blue-grey embrace of the Gault Clay lies this beautifully preserved Proeuhoplites subtuberculatus, collected from Bed II (iv) of the Folkestone Gault in Kent, southeast England. Measuring just 35 millimetres across, this ...

Fossilized poo harbors remains from mammoths, bison and big cats, including some of the oldest DNA ever reconstructed

Millipedes may have been crawling across Earth's landscapes nearly 460 million years ago, long before vertebrates ventured onto land. A new study finally completes their evolutionary family tree, revealing surprising clues about these ancient ecosystem engineers and their early chemical defenses.

Approximately 160 million years ago, during the Age of Dinosaurs, giant marine reptiles ruled the seas. One such creature, an ichthyosaur, swam in a sea near present-day Peterborough, England. This huge animal, shaped like a dolphin, was a quick swimmer that chased prey such as ammonites and squid for sustenance. However, on this day, luck […]

For years, a mysterious predator haunted the fossil beds of Changma Basin in northwest China....

An ancient predator is once again at the center of attention, not because of how it lived millions of years ago, but because of the remarkable journey its fossils have taken in modern times.

A newly identified crocodile species nicknamed “Lucy’s hunter” prowled Ethiopia’s rivers when Lucy’s species walked the Earth more than 3 million years ago. The giant predator was likely the most dangerous animal in the ecosystem and may have regularly hunted early human relatives.

A newly discovered feathered dinosaur from China may help solve a long-standing mystery surrounding a fossil bed filled with ancient bird remains. For years, one fossil site in northwestern China has posed a mystery. The area contains hundreds of fossilized birds, many remarkably well preserved. Mixed among them are strange clusters of shattered bones compressed [...]

The Cambrian explosion was one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of evolution....

A Virginia Tech-led team of international scientists has solved one of the last major mysteries in millipede evolution, revealing new clues about a group of animals that helped pave the way for life on land. The findings, published in Current Biology, complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders. By combining genomic data from living species with morphological evidence f…

Scientists thought they understood the timeline of early human-like walking. Then a set of ancient footprints from the Mediterranean revealed a story that few expected.

Ancient Australian fossils indicate that the earliest eukaryotes depended on oxygen, providing new evidence that oxygen helped enable the evolution of complex life. Stored in an open-air warehouse in tropical Darwin, Australia, are dozens of trays containing cylindrical cores of rock. They are from drill holes bored hundreds of meters below the surface by mineral [...]

A spectacular fossil fish discovered on a remote cliff in New Zealand nearly 30 years ago has finally revealed its full story thanks to an unexpected discovery: the original collector’s long-lost field notebooks. The 1.2-meter fossil, preserved in stunning three-dimensional detail, belonged to an ancient tarpon-like predator that cruised New Zealand waters about 55 million years ago.

Paleontologists have identified a previously unknown species of amphicyonid -- the extinct family of carnivorous mammals popularly known as bear-dogs -- from two specimens unearthed at a rich fossil site in the Vallès-Penedès Basin near Barcelona, Spain. The post New Species of Ancient Bear-Dog Identified in Spain appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News .

Prehistoric squirrel droppings were analyzed and found to contain genetic material of numerous ice-age beasts, plants, microbes and fungi.