Long before paleontology had a playbook, bones and teeth surfaced from riverbanks and caves like messages from another world. Communities tried to translate them the only way they knew how: through stories of monsters, guardians, and gods. The result was a strange duet between geology and imagination, where fossil finds could validate legends and legends ...
Beneath the shimmering waters of Florida’s Nature Coast lies an ecological treasure one of the last thriving seagrass meadows in the world. While these underwater prairies have vanished at alarming rates globally, a new study reveals that Florida’s northern Gulf Coast has quietly preserved its seagrass ecosystems for thousands of years. Using an unconventional approach ...
First, scientists have found the record of an enormous tsunami that hit Japan when dinosaurs roamed the Earth stored not in rock but in amber. A new research shows that twisted pieces of ancient tree resin, 115 million years old, have the characteristic marks of a deadly oceanic wave. In a study published in Scientific ...
Picture a late Jurassic hillside: scrubby trees, broken rock, a restless afternoon breeze kicking into steady gusts. Small, feathered dinosaurs – nimble, hot-blooded, curious – run, leap, and splay proto-wings that catch the air like kites tugging at their strings. It’s a scene that flips the usual script: not silent forests of gliders, but noisy ...
Few fossils have transformed our understanding of evolution as radically as Archaeopteryx, the famous “first bird” that obliterated the dividing line between dinosaurs and contemporary birds. Today, a newly re-examined specimen, the 14th ever found, is re authoring the history of flight itself. In exquisite detail, this fossil shows previously unseen aspects of Archaeopteryx’s feathers, ...
For over a century, the fossil record pinned the rise of reptiles to around 320 million years ago, during the late Carboniferous period. But a serendipitous discovery in the rugged outcrops of southeastern Australia has thrown that timeline into chaos. A set of clawed footprints, preserved in a slab of rock no larger than a ...
Paleontology, the scientific study of ancient life through fossils, plays a crucial role in unraveling the mysteries of mass extinctions. These significant events, which have drastically altered the course of life on Earth, are periods when a substantial proportion of species vanish in a geologically brief timeframe. Through the lens of paleontology, researchers explore various ...
Modern paleontology didn’t arrive with a single eureka moment – it grew out of a string of bold bets, lucky finds, and clever tools that turned stone into story. For decades, fossils were treated like cabinet curiosities; today, they are data-rich time capsules read with lasers, isotopes, and genomes. The field’s biggest advances now come ...
For the first time, a stunningly well-preserved fossil of a genuine cicada has been found at the Messel Pit in Germany, providing an unprecedented insight into the old world of these buzzing insects. The newly discovered species, Eoplatypleura messelensis, is 47 million years old and is one of the most ancient recorded ancestors of contemporary ...
For more than a century, dinosaurs have lived a double life: Hollywood monsters on screen, carefully reconstructed animals in museum halls. Yet a wave of new discoveries is quietly ripping up even those careful reconstructions, revealing creatures that look less like the lizard titans we grew up with and more like surreal mashups from ...
