Fossils News

September 9, 2016

New Reptile Species from 212 Million Years Ago

360-Million-Year-Old Tetrapod Rewrites Sea ...

Strange Fossil: Snake Eats Lizard Eats Beetle

How Ancient and Modern Fish Survived Youth

Latest Headlines

updated 12:32am EDT

Clues in Ancient Mud Hold Answers to Climate Change

Sep. 1, 2016 — New research suggests that Africa has gradually become wetter over the past 1.3 million years -- instead of drier as was ... read more

Paleontology: A Monster Put in Its Place

Sep. 1, 2016 — An analysis of the fossil known as the Minden Monster has enabled paleontologists to assign the largest predatory dinosaur ever found in Germany to a previously unknown genus, among a group that ... read more

Life Thrived on Young Earth: Scientists Discover 3.7-Billion-Year-Old Fossils

Aug. 31, 2016 — A team of Australian researchers has uncovered the world's oldest fossils in a remote area of Greenland, capturing the ... read more

Fossil Pollen 'Sneeze' Caught by Research Team

Aug. 30, 2016 — Researchers have recorded the only known example of prehistoric pollen caught in explosive mid-discharge from a fossil flower. The team describes this "freeze-frame" ... read more

Smarter Brains Are Blood-Thirsty Brains

Aug. 30, 2016 — A new project has overturned the theory that the evolution of human intelligence was simply related to the size of the brain -- but rather linked more closely to the supply ... read more

A Rare Small Specimen Discovered from the Age of Flying Giants

Aug. 30, 2016 — A rare small-bodied pterosaur, a flying reptile from the Late Cretaceous period approximately 77 million years ago, is the first of its kind to have been discovered on the ... read more

New Species of Pterosaur Discovered in Patagonia

Aug. 30, 2016 — Scientists today announced the discovery of a new species of pterosaur from the Patagonia region of South America. The cranial remains were in an excellent state of preservation and belonged to a new ... read more

Cracking the Coldest Case: How Lucy, the Most Famous Human Ancestor, Died

Aug. 29, 2016 — Lucy, the most famous fossil of a human ancestor, probably died after falling from a tree, according to a new study. Researchers have found that the injury Lucy sustained was ... read more

New Tiny Species of Extinct Australian Marsupial Lion Named After Sir David Attenborough

Aug. 23, 2016 — The fossil remains of a new tiny species of marsupial lion which prowled the lush rainforests of northern Australia about 18 ... read more

Whales in the Desert?

Aug. 24, 2016 — In Cerro Colorado, located in the Ica Desert of Peru, sedimentary sequences dating back nine million years have been found to host the fossil skeletons of hundreds of marine ... read more

A Rare, Nearly Complete T. Rex Skull Just Arrived In Seattle

1.7-Million-Year-Old Bone Shows Cancer Has Been Around For A Long Time

T Rex May Have Been Asian Immigrant

Stegosaurus Had a Bite Like a Sheep

Ancient Air Pockets Changing the History of Earth’s Oxygen

Aug. 22, 2016 — Geologists are using new direct methods to measure the Earth's oxygenation. They identified, for the first time, exactly how much oxygen was in Earth's atmosphere 813 million years ago -- ... read more

Beetles Pollinated Orchids Millions of Year Ago, Fossil Evidence Shows

Aug. 22, 2016 — When most people hear the word 'pollinator,' they think of bees and butterflies. However, certain beetles are known to pollinate plants as well, and new fossil evidence indicates that they ... read more

Paleontologists Discover Major T. Rex Fossil

Aug. 18, 2016 — Paleontologists have discovered a Tyrannosaurus rex, including a very complete skull. The find, which paleontologists estimate to be about 20 percent of the animal, includes vertebrae, ribs, hips and ... read more

Pre-Hispanic Mexican Civilization May Have Bred and Managed Rabbits and Hares

Aug. 17, 2016 — Humans living in the pre-Hispanic Mexican city of Teotihuacan may have bred rabbits and hares for food, fur and bone tools, according to a new ... read more

Reinterpreting the Fossil Record on Jaws

Aug. 17, 2016 — Scientists use the fossil record to make judgments on the physiology and behavior of species. But are those interpretations correct? New research puts into question how we interpret the behavior of ... read more

Tree-Rings Reveal Secret Clocks That Could Reset Key Dates Across the Ancient World

Aug. 17, 2016 — In a new paper, the authors explain how harvesting data from tree-rings could revolutionize the study of ancient civilizations such as the Egyptian and Mayan worlds. Until now scholars have had only ... read more

New Species of Extinct River Dolphin Discovered in Smithsonian Collection

Aug. 16, 2016 — A fossil that has been in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History since it was discovered in 1951 is today helping scientists piece together the evolutionary ... read more

Twenty-Five Little Bones Tell a Puzzling Story About Early Primate Evolution

Aug. 15, 2016 — A cache of exquisitely preserved bones, found in a coal mine in the state of Gujarat, India, appear to be the most primitive primate bones yet discovered, according to a new analysis. Their ... read more

Britain's Last Hunter-Gatherers Discovered Using Breakthrough Analysis of Bone Fragments

Aug. 11, 2016 — Archaeologists have identified rare human bones from the UK dating to the Late Mesolithic era (around 4000 BC, just prior to the arrival of farming in Britain) using an innovative new bone collagen ... read more

Unearthed: The Cannibal Sharks of a Forgotten Age

Aug. 11, 2016 — Scientists have discovered incredible fossil evidence that a 300-million-year-old shark, which mildly resembled a modern-day bull shark, cannibalized its ... read more

Textbook Story of How Humans Populated America Is 'Biologically Unviable,' Study Finds

Aug. 10, 2016 — Using ancient DNA, researchers have created a unique picture of how a prehistoric migration route evolved over thousands of years -- revealing that it could not have been used by the first people to ... read more

Tracing the Evolution of Bird Reproduction

Aug. 10, 2016 — What really came first -- the chicken or the egg? Birds' reproductive biology is dramatically different from that of any other living vertebrates, and scientists have long wondered how and when ... read more

New Piltdown Hoax Analysis Points to Work of 'Lone Forger'

Aug. 10, 2016 — Latest analysis of the famous Piltdown Man forgeries points the finger of suspicion even more firmly at their discoverer, Charles ... read more

Deer Evolution: Ancient DNA Reveals Novel Relationships

Aug. 9, 2016 — Researchers have sequenced mitochondrial DNA from museum specimens of rare species of deer. Analysis of partial nucleotide sequences has enabled the team to refine our picture of the evolutionary ... read more

Whales' Ultrasonic Hearing Has Surprisingly Ancient History, Fossilized Ear Shows

Aug. 4, 2016 — All living toothed whales rely upon echoes of their own calls to navigate and hunt underwater, a skill that works best in conjunction with high-frequency hearing. Now, researchers who studied one of ... read more

New Light Shed on How Vertebrates See: Details in Eyes of 300-Million-Year-Old Lamprey and Hagfish Fossils

Aug. 2, 2016 — New research has overturned a long-standing theory on how vertebrates evolved their eyes by identifying remarkable details of the retina in the eyes of 300 million year-old lamprey and hagfish ... read more

Lack of Water Likely Caused Extinction of Isolated Alaska Mammoths

Aug. 1, 2016 — A remnant population of woolly mammoths on a remote Alaska island was likely pushed to extinction by rising sea levels and a lack of access to fresh water, according to a newly published ... read more

New Fossil Evidence Supports Theory That First Mass Extinction Engineered by Early Animals

July 29, 2016 — Newly discovered fossil evidence from Namibia strengthens the proposition that the world's first mass extinction was caused by 'ecosystem engineers' -- newly evolved biological ... read more

Tooth Wear Sheds Light on the Feeding Habits of Ancient Elephant Relatives

July 28, 2016 — How can we ever know what ancient animals ate? For the first time, the changing diets of elephants in the last two million years in China have been reconstructed, using a technique based on analysis ... read more