Paleontology
- Life
Fossil helps document shift from sea to land
New fossils of an ancient, four-limbed creature help fill in the blanks of the evolutionary transition between fish and the first land-adapted vertebrates.
- Paleontology
Ancient burrows
Triassic-era sediments unearthed in Antarctica reveal the well-preserved lair of a four-legged, mammal-like reptile.
- Paleontology
A mammoth divide
Woolly mammoths roamed Siberia in two distinct clans, and the split between the groups, scientists say, is surprisingly deep, occurring more than 1 million years ago.
- Paleontology
Walking tall
Some types of the largest flying reptiles ever known were well adapted to life on the ground.
- Life
Reviving extinct DNA
For the first time, scientists have resurrected a piece of DNA from an extinct animal — the Tasmanian tiger. The researchers engineered mice with a piece of the long-gone marsupial's DNA that turns on a collagen gene in cartilage-producing cells.
- Paleontology
China was an ancient-ape paradise
Fossil dig uncovers the oldest known remains of ancestral gibbons
- Paleontology
Salty Old Cellulose: Tiny fibers found in ancient halite deposits
Researchers have recovered microscopic bits of cellulose from 253-million-year-old salt deposits deep underground.
- Paleontology
Twice upon a Time
New fossil finds suggest that the complex features of mammals originated earlier than previously thought and might even have evolved independently in different mammalian lineages.
- Paleontology
From China, the tiniest pterodactyl
Researchers excavating the fossil-rich rocks of northeastern China have discovered yet another paleontological marvel: a flying reptile the size of a sparrow.
- Paleontology
Flying Deaf? Earliest bats probably didn’t echolocate
Fossils of a cardinal-sized creature recently unearthed in western Wyoming suggest that primitive bats developed the ability to fly before they could track their prey with biological sonar.
- Paleontology
Life explodes twice
The Ediacaran fauna were as varied as all animals in existence today and, more impressively, as in the Cambrian, report paleontologists.
- Paleontology
The warm jungles of ancient France
Chemical analyses of amber excavated near Paris suggest that France was covered with a dense tropical forest about 55 million years ago.
