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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
In a revolutionary find along South Africa’s Cape coast, researchers have identified the world’s earliest fossilized pangolin tracks, dating to as much as 140,000 years ago. But here’s the twist: The prehistoric trail was cracked not with high-tech imaging or artificial intelligence, but through the traditional know-how of Namibia’s Indigenous Master Trackers, whose age-old expertise ...
The coelacanth is often dubbed a “living fossil” due to its striking resemblance to fossils dating back 400 million years. Discovered alive in the 1930s, it defied the belief that it went extinct 66 million years ago. Paleontologists are actively investigating its ancestors to understand how the coelacanth managed to survive multiple mass extinctions, as ...
Far out in the dry badlands of South Africa’s Karoo Basin, fossils have been unearthed by paleontologists that rewrite the book on prehistoric survival and extinction. The fossils are those of Inostrancevia, a giant saber-toothed predator known to science only through Russian fossils until now. The tiger-sized gorgonopsian proto-mammal with reptilian traits somehow traveled an ...
New research reveals mammals were abandoning trees millions of years before the asteroid hit changing everything we know about their survival. The Great Mammal Migration: From Trees to Terrain For decades, scientists believed mammals only flourished after dinosaurs went extinct. But a groundbreaking 2025 study analyzing fragmentary limb bones from Late Cretaceous mammals reveals a ...
In the misty crags of the Canadian Rockies, a set of ancient footprints has surfaced, each one a whisper from a creature that last walked the Earth 100 million years ago. But these are no ordinary dinosaur tracks. They’re the first of their kind, offering unprecedented insight into a club-tailed tank of a dinosaur never ...
