Bruce Rubidge, University of the Witwatersrand and Mike Day, University of the Witwatersrand
The Karoo provides not only a historical record of biological change over a period of Earth’s history but also a means to test theories of evolutionary processes over long periods of time.
The challenge we face after a century of extraordinary discoveries is pinning down the lineage and mapping the evolutionary route through which we as human beings got here.
Since 1903, pop culture has been struggling to catch up with the fact that there was no such creature as a Brontosaurus. But now it turns out that there was, so thank goodness for that.
We still hear and read a lot about how a diet based on what our Stone Age ancestors ate may be a cure-all for modern ills. But can we really run the clock backwards and find the optimal way to eat? It’s…
The discovery of a nearly complete fossil skeleton of a teenage girl in the Hoyo Negro submerged cave system in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula provides new insight into the first people to inhabit the Americas…
Collecting fossils helps raise interest in palaeontology and the natural history of Australia, and many important fossil discoveries have been made by members of the public collecting unusual specimens…
On the same day that the latest instalment of the Jurassic Park film series has been confirmed, a study published in the journal PLOS One has detailed experiments that seem to demonstrate once and for…
An aquatic lizard twice the length of a Komodo dragon once lurked in rivers during the age of dinosaurs, according to a team of Hungarian-Canadian researchers. The 85 million-year-old Pannoniasaurus is…
Before this week, palaeontologists believed the earliest known dinosaurs were small bipedal creatures that lived 230 million years ago in South America. This “oldest known dinosaur” floor proved quite…
The $30 billion Woodside Petroleum development slated for James Price Point in the Kimberley has been allowed to go ahead on the condition it does not affect thousands of fossilised dinosaur footprints…
It’s taken a century of debate, but in the past two decades we’re finally understanding where birds came from. Now, with a new study published in the journal Nature, Chinese and Canadian researchers have…
Could we have found the first artist’s studio in human history? We may well have. We all recognise the material signs of wealth. Fast cars, large yachts and sparkling bling all tell us who has more. Crowns…