Vertebrate paleontology is the scientific discipline within paleontology that focuses on the study of fossilized remains of vertebrate animals, including their morphology, systematics, evolutionary relationships, and paleoecology. It integrates anatomical analysis, comparative biology, stratigraphy, and geochronology to reconstruct the origin, diversification, and extinction patterns of vertebrates through deep time. Research in vertebrate paleontology often involves detailed examination of skeletal elements, functional morphology, and phylogenetic methods to infer evolutionary trajectories and biogeographic histories, as well as to interpret environmental and climatic conditions recorded in vertebrate fossil assemblages and associated sedimentary contexts.
New research conducted by paleontologists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the CNRS (France) documents the earliest occurrence of a fossilized regurgitation produced by a strictly ...
Ecology
Jan 30, 2026
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Babies and very young sauropods—the long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters that in adulthood were the largest animals to have ever walked on land—were a key food sustaining predators in the Late Jurassic, according to a new ...
Ecology
Jan 30, 2026
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Whether it's digging up weathered bones from a paleontological site or reexamining forgotten trays in museum and university collections, the study of dinosaurs still throws up something new.
A new study using advanced artificial intelligence (AI) has revealed that the asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago caused only a modest decline in shark and ray species. The findings, published ...
Evolution
Jan 28, 2026
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170
Australian and New Zealand scientists have unearthed the remains of ancient wildlife in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa's North Island, the first time a large number of million-year-old fossils have been found—including an ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jan 28, 2026
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599
Scientists analyzing 443-million-year-old Scottish fossils have uncovered the early evidence that some of the first groups of vertebrates possessed surprisingly advanced eyes and traces of bone, reshaping our understanding ...
Molecular & Computational biology
Jan 28, 2026
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A new species of amphibian that lived 150 million years ago has been discovered in Portugal. The tiny animal was one of the earliest species belonging to a mysterious group of amphibians that lived from the time of the dinosaurs ...
Paleontology & Fossils
Jan 28, 2026
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341
When you hear the word "dinosaur," the first thing that might spring to mind is a hulking skeleton like Sue the T rex in Chicago's Field Museum or Sophie the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London. Dinosaur skeletons ...
Biotechnology
Jan 27, 2026
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26
A new app, powered by artificial intelligence (AI), could help scientists and the public identify dinosaur footprints made millions of years ago, a study reveals.
Biotechnology
Jan 26, 2026
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New fossil evidence from China suggests that some of our vertebrate ancestors had four eyes. The study, published in Nature, takes a closer look at a structure found in multiple 518 million-year-old fossils, which appears ...
