Rare insect discovery reveals a new species from the dinosaur age
Some 99 million years ago, during the age of the dinosaurs, a tiny insect belonging to a species previously unknown to science became trapped in tree resin. The resin hardened and turned into amber, a...
New saber-toothed predator from Argentina suggests its lineage survived longer than believed
In 2014, members of a local museum found fragments of an ancient fossil dating to the end of the Pliocene or early Pleistocene epoch in a seaside cliff on the Argentine pampas. They belonged to a larg...
518-Million-Year-Old Fossil Challenges What We Thought Starfish Came From
A creature preserved for 518 million years hints that the starfish family began with tentacles, challenging a long-standing picture of its earliest ancestor. Fossils discovered in southwestern China s...
Early Ediacaran micro- and macro-fossils from South China provide insights into post-Snowball Earth marine ecosystem
97-million-year-old fossils reveal the earliest known animal “GPS”
Mysterious 97-million-year-old magnetic fossils may be the oldest evidence of an animal using Earth’s magnetic field like a built-in GPS. Their sophisticated magnetic structure could have helped an un...
What medieval people made of fossils before vertebrate paleontology
In this excerpt from "The Story of the Mammals in 25 Discoveries," author Donald R. Prothero looks at a time when the idea of extinction was blasphemous.
Animals may have evolved vastly earlier than fossil evidence suggests
The earliest animals may have evolved hundreds of millions of years before their first unmistakable fossils appear in the fossil record, according to a new study led by the University of Oxford. The f...
Stunning fossil shows dinosaurs’ distinctive path to flight
Nature, Published online: 02 October 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-03126-8 A fossil from a previously undiscovered species with feathery limbs, unearthed in China, adds to evidence that dinosaurs and b...
Homo erectus Was Outnumbered 10 to One by Another Human Relative
Fossils from Drimolen Cave capture a moment when two contrasting hominin species lived side by side. Two million years ago, two very different human relatives occupied the same landscape in what is no...
Stunning fossil shows dinosaurs' distinctive path to flight
Spinosaurus May Have Spent Most of Its Life Underwater, New Study Finds
A new study sheds light on which animal groups evolved from life on land to living in the water again. Spinosaurus, one of the most debated dinosaurs in paleontology, may have spent the vast majority ...
Fossil wood reveals climate stress and fungal decomposition in Late Triassic (Norian) forests in central Europe
Papers in Palaeontology, Volume 12, Issue 5, September/October 2026.
Fossil long known as world's oldest reptile dethroned
For nearly 30 years, a small fossil from Scotland has been celebrated as one of the earliest known reptiles. A new study out today in Nature and led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural Hi...
Adult fossil strengthens evidence for Homo erectus in southern Africa 2 million years ago
La Trobe archaeologists have described 18 new hominin fossils, including a second Homo erectus skull fragment that confirms the species first appeared in southern Africa 2.0 million years ago—200,000 ...
Evolution of terrestrial anatomy revealed by a derived stem tetrapod
This 245-million-year-old fossil still has its stomach and intestines
A 245-million-year-old marine reptile fossil preserves an astonishing amount of detail, including its stomach, liver, and intestines. The discovery reveals that Austronaga minuta was highly adapted fo...
Bats may have first evolved in Europe 65 million years ago
A huge genomic and fossil study suggests bats first evolved in Europe around 65 to 60 million years ago before spreading across the globe. The findings also indicate that flight and echolocation emerg...
Dinosaur snacked on seaweed washed up on North American coasts, fossil teeth suggest
Storms routinely wash marine material ashore, providing food for land animals and other organisms. This is known as marine subsidization (MS). Today, MS is particularly common in coastal ecosystems an...
New feathered, winged dinosaur from China challenges our theories on bird and dinosaur evolution
A newly described feathered dinosaur found in northeastern China adds evidence supporting the theory that flight-related features evolved differently in various bird-like dinosaur groups. The findings...
A Fossil Misidentified for Decades Turns Out To Be a 309-Million-Year-Old Species
A misidentified museum fossil has revealed Jeanerpeton mazonensis, a distinct amphibian ancestor that lived near present-day Chicago 309 million years ago. Jeanerpeton mazonensis, an early ancestor of...