When you think of , probably the first things that come to mind are those famous colorful logs turned to stone. But beneath this stunning landscape lies a treasure trove of ancient secrets that’s rewriting what we know about life on Earth over 200 million years ago. Scientists are discovering that this park isn’t just ...
In the heart of Utah’s high desert, a sun-bleached ridge hides a puzzle that has nagged at paleontologists for generations. How did so many dinosaurs – especially big predators – end up tangled together in one place, their bones jumbled like driftwood after a storm? The site, anchored by the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry within Utah’s ...
Deep under the waters of the Madura Strait, off Java’s coast, archaeologists have made a prehistoric discovery that would turn our knowledge of ancient human migration and survival upside down. Fossilized human remains of Homo erectus, along with bones from elephants, hippos, and even river sharks, tell the picture of a lost world: Sundaland, a ...
In a Cretaceous forest now frozen into stone, a small predator wore feathers like a secret. Fossils from northeastern China show Microraptor with flight-quality feathers not just on its arms, but also on its legs – a four-winged blueprint that looks both ingenious and improbable. For decades, the mystery has simmered: was this animal a ...
They looked like sleek torpedoes carved from shadow and muscle, yet these ocean hunters were not fish and not mammals, but reptiles that mastered the seas long before whales even existed. For about 160 million years, ichthyosaurs raced through ancient oceans, evolving streamlined bodies and enormous eyes that cut through dim light like headlights in ...
Picture a horizon trembling under the shadow of wings as wide as a small plane and legs as tall as a person, stepping through river flats like a silent metronome. That was the late Cretaceous stage set for the giant azhdarchid pterosaurs – apex flyers with stilt-like limbs and a talent for surprise. Fossils say ...
Imagine a world where Antarctica wasn’t a frozen wasteland but a lush, river-cut forest teeming with life where dinosaurs, not penguins, roamed under months-long polar darkness. This was Earth 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous, when what is now southern Australia sat within the Antarctic Circle. Thanks to groundbreaking research analyzing ancient pollen ...
For more than a century, a single spiral of teeth has taunted paleontologists with a maddening question: where in the world did it go in the mouth? The animal behind that riddle – Helicoprion – swam Earth’s seas long before dinosaurs, yet its legacy feels strangely modern, like a design brief left on a lab ...
Today’s Arctic is a land of bitterly cold winters, unceasing summer daylight, and a delicate ecology full of migrating birds. But a revolutionary finding in northern Alaska points to an avian paradise far older than we could have ever known. A wealth of 73-million-year-old fossils, including delicate bones of embryos and hatchlings, shows that birds ...
Every time you wince from savoring ice cream or feel the sting of hot coffee, you are living a legacy 460 million years in development. According to ground-breaking studies, human teeth started as sensory armor on ancient fish, guiding them across the dangerous waters of the Ordovician period rather than tools for chewing. A study ...
Maria Faith Saligumba
