Dinosaurs get all the glory. But aetosaurs, a heavily armored cousin of modern crocodiles, ruled the world before dinosaurs did. These tanks of the Triassic came in a variety of shapes and sizes before going extinct around ...
Vertebrates are defined as all animals that possess a vertebral column, or backbone. Most living vertebrates also possess jaws, teeth and paired fins or limbs.
An international research team has examined unusual skeletal structures of various European bird fossils from the Eocene. The bone surfaces of the approximately 40- to 50-million-year-old cervical vertebrae show conspicuous ...
Around 262 million years ago, during the middle Permian Period, a new family of reptiles emerged. Pareiasaurs—meaning "cheek lizards," a reference to the flat flanges of bone that make up their cheeks—had skulls covered ...
Researchers have described a new species of armored reptile that lived near the time of the first appearance of dinosaurs. With bony plates on its backbone, this archosaur fossil reveals that armor was a boomerang trait in ...
About 350 million years ago, your evolutionary ancestors—and the ancestors of all modern vertebrates—were merely soft-bodied animals living in the oceans. In order to survive and evolve to become what we are today, these ...
Mammals are a bit odd when it comes to bones. Rather than the bony plates and scales of crocodiles, turtles, lizards, dinosaurs and fish, mammals long ago traded in their ancestral suit of armor for a layer of insulating ...
Scientists have discovered a new species of mosasaur, a sea-dwelling lizard from the age of the dinosaurs, with strange, ridged teeth unlike those of any known reptile. Along with other recent finds from Africa, it suggests ...
A fossil of a "royal fish"—estimated to be more than 66 million years old—is the first ever to be found in Africa.
About 360 million years ago, in the shallow subtropical waters above what is now the city of Cleveland, an armor-plated fish many believed to be up to 30 feet long ruled the seas.
