Imagine a world where the first delicate blossoms didn’t just paint the landscape – they disrupted the rules of the hunt. During the Cretaceous, flowering plants spread across floodplains and uplands, patching forests with open, herbaceous meadows that changed visibility, scent, and shelter. That botanical makeover put pressure on both sides of the chase: ...
Imagine a Cretaceous floodplain humming like a hidden suburb, with dozens of cratered mounds, crushed eggshell mosaics, and juvenile tracks stitched into the mud. That is the mystery paleontologists are circling today: scattered sites that look less like isolated nests and more like organized neighborhoods. For decades, fossils hinted at care and coordination; now ...
The discovery of Zhongyuansaurus junchangi, an new species of ankylosaurid from the Henan Province of China, adds a new dimension to the history of armored dinosaurs. It was an herbivore, as well as heavily armored, and lived during the Early Cretaceous period roughly 113-100 million years ago. Its evolutionary peculiarities included a bizzare ‘swallowtail’ tail ...
A treasure trove of 380-million-year-old fossils in the sun-baked rocks of Western Australia’s Gogo Formation is changing the story of how the first land animals hunted and ate. A new study published in iScience gives us shocking new information about the diets of ancient lungfish, which are the ancestors of fish and four-legged vertebrates like ...
A gull-sized flying reptile has emerged from fossil-rich layers of Arizona’s Petrified Forest, revealing the earliest known pterosaur in North America. Named Eotephradactylus mcintireae, this delicate creature lived 209 million years ago and shared its ecosystem with turtles, amphibians, and armored reptiles, capturing a moment of evolutionary transition before the end-Triassic extinction. A Fossil Treasure ...
A new study published in Scientific Reports uncovers a tragic feeding mistake preserved in stone: Jurassic fish of the genus Tharsis choked to death while attempting to swallow squid-like cephalopods called belemnites. The fossils, found in Germany’s Solnhofen Limestone, offer rare insight into predator-prey dynamics and ecological conditions 150 million years ago. Fossils from a ...
This summer, the latest installment of the Jurassic World franchise, titled Rebirth, will showcase familiar patterns from the franchise while introducing towering titanosaurs and mutant dinosaurs as well as the beloved T. rex. However, bringing such creatures to life on screen in a tangible manner is Dr. Steve Brusatte’s work. Paleontologist Brusatte fixes the monsters ...
For more than 150 million years, science didn’t notice a small, fast-moving dinosaur that lived in the floodplains of Jurassic North America. It lived in the shadow of giants like Stegosaurus and Allosaurus. Palaeontologists are now having to rethink what they thought they knew about how dinosaurs evolved because of a new species called Enigmacursor ...
Deep in Mongolia’s windswept deserts, a long-forgotten fossil has surfaced from the shadows of prehistory exposing a vital missing link in the narrative of the most terrifying predators to have ever trotted the planet. Meet Khan khuluu mongoliensis, the “Dragon Prince of Mongolia,” a recently discovered tyrannosaur that fills in between early, small-sized hunters and ...
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 ...
