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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Maria Faith Saligumba
