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The extinction that ended the Age of Dinosaurs is best known for clearing the way for the Age of Mammals on land. Scientists have long suspected that the same catastrophe also transformed life in the seas, opening ecological ...
A fossil mammal tooth smaller than a grain of rice does not announce itself loudly. It must be hard won from sediment and stone. Then, under a microscope, it reveals itself—no longer just a speck of blackness but a surface ...
Many animals, including humans, rely on their eyes to detect changes in their surroundings. The eyes of vertebrates, animals with a backbone or a similar supporting structure, contain a transparent structure (i.e., the lens) ...
When an asteroid struck Earth about 66 million years ago, it ended the age of dinosaurs and transformed life across the planet. The effects of that catastrophe are visible in the fossil record on land, but scientists know ...
A fossil bed in northwestern China is littered with the remains of hundreds of prehistoric birds—including some whose broken bones were crushed into pellets, similar to those coughed up by modern owls. For years, scientists ...
The wooly mammoth from Taimering (Bavaria, Germany), discovered in 2020, was buried in a former Ice Age pond after its death. Pollen findings and radiocarbon dating confirm that the mammoth lived and died during the harsh ...
Bryozoans are tiny, filter-feeding colonial invertebrates that thrive in the world's oceans today, yet for decades their origins presented a puzzling gap in the fossil record. While nearly every other major animal group made ...
A new raptor-like dinosaur from some 70 million years ago that ate fish and behaved like modern herons has been unearthed from southern Patagonia. The new species, which has been named Kank australis, was identified based ...
In the Triassic, the modern animals we know were just beginning to diversify into a menagerie of forms and body plans that rhyme with the lifestyles of extinct and living animals better known to the public, but nested in ...
A recently discovered extinct bird from the early Cretaceous Period (approximately 121 million years ago) may have waggled its long tail feathers to attract mates, according to a study published May 27, 2026 in the open-access ...
