Imagine leaving and discovering, from a dinosaur taller than a house, a huge, three-toed footprint pressed into the ground not from a bird. Not science fiction is this situation. Recent findings in Brazil and Cameroon show that dinosaurs did in fact wander areas today including city streets, farms, and highways 120 million years ago. Originally ...
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 ...
Dinosaur fossils have captivated our minds for decades by providing windows into a lost world of tall predators and gentle giants. But suppose these old bones contain more than just paleontological marvels? Imagine if they could open medical discoveries in our cancer fight. Published in Biology, a groundbreaking study reveals that dinosaur fossils especially their ...
For decades, the megalodon, a terrible shark that ate only whales has been portrayed as the ultimate oceanic horror, its enormous jaws able to crush a car with a single bite. But shockingly more surprising new studies show Otodus megalodon was not the picky whale specialist we thought of. Rather, it was an opportunistic apex ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
