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.
Roaming among the dinosaurs in Jurassic World.
ILM/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment
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.
Harking back to the diet of the caveman.
Flickr/George
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…
Naia, which means water nymph in Greek, in her watery grave.
Daniel Riordan Araujo
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…
The Lark Quarry dinosaur trackway is the world’s only fossilised dinosaur stampede. But the fossils could fetch a lot of money if sold, so how do we keep them safe?
AAP/Tourism Queensland
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…
This stingless bee had neither sting nor DNA.
David Penney/University of Manchester
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…
Palaeontologists from the University of New South Wales have discovered an extinct species of koala that lived in northern…
The giant river lizard Pannoniasaurus inexpectus (top) was roughly six metres long. In life, the animal would have resembled the smaller, related Aigialosaurus (bottom).
FunkMonk/Wikimedia Commons
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…
A 240 million-year-old dinosaur was the size of a golden retriever with a very long tail.
Natural History Museum Mark Witton
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…