The fossils with the carbon fibre tube they were kept in on the space flight.
Wits University
Experts insist there is no scientific reason for allowing these fossils to travel to space.
The lessons pollen can teach us are not to be sneezed at.
Elisa Manzati
Pollen can become preserved in sediment deposits over thousands, or even millions, of years.
Zamurovic Brothers/Shutterstock
The fossil record tells conflicting stories about what happened to flowering plants after the asteroid.
Pteranodon was a large-bodied pterosaur.
YuRi Photolife / Shutterstock
Reptiles don’t generally care for their offspring, but some pterosaurs may have bucked the trend.
Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images
Some footprints last thousands or even millions of years, preserved in sand that turned to rock.
An artistic impression of the various dinosaur species that once roamed the Roma Valley.
Akhil Rampersadh
Fossilised tracks of a group of plant-eating dinosaurs have been found in Lesotho’s Roma Valley for the first time.
Three 3D views of Bradysaurus baini specimen (FMNH UC 1533). Scale bar equals 50 cm. Published in Van den Brandt et al. 2023
Credit: Fabio Manucci and Marco Romano
Large pareiasaurs are among the earliest huge plant-eating tetrapods to appear in the history of the development of life on Earth.
Authors provided
Foulden Maar is one of only two sites in New Zealand that preserve fossils showing ecological interactions and features such as eyes, skin, stomach contents and original colour patterns.
david.costa.art/Shutterstock
New research shows that placental mammals survived the mass extinction that killed the
dinosaurs.
The spiky branches of a monkey puzzle tree.
Joshua Bruce Allen/Shutterstock
The arrangement of leaves on most plants follows a mathematical pattern – new research sheds light on how it evolved.
Katrina Kenny
Researchers have found an armoured fossil skink 1,000 times heavier than the ones in your garden. Its closest living relative is the shingleback lizard.
Kira Westaway
New evidence from contested Laos cave site shows humans reached Southeast Asia at least 68,000 years ago.
Dendrolagus goodfelowi, or Goodfellow’s tree-kangaroo.
Shutterstock
The ancestors of kangaroos once lived in the trees – but their evolutionary history is murky. Here’s everything we know so far.
Virtual Australian Museum of Palaeontology
Digital scanning offers a new window on Australia’s unique fossil history, from early multicellular lifeforms to gigantic ‘marsupial lions’.
Jacob van Zoelen
Having special foot adaptations helped these sizeable animals wander long distances, which meant a better chance to find plentiful food and water.
Life reconstruction of an Australian pterosaur.
Peter Trusler
In the dinosaur era, flying reptiles soared in the skies of what is now Australia – but we have barely any fossil records of them.
The oldest known footprint of our species, lightly ringed with chalk. It appears long and narrow because the trackmaker dragged their heel.
Charles Helm
This was an area in which early anatomically modern humans survived, evolved and thrived, before spreading out of Africa to other continents.
Ancient DNA preserved in the tooth tartar of human fossils encodes microbial metabolites that could be the next antibiotic.
Werner/Siemens Foundation
Ancient microbes likely produced natural products their descendants today do not. Tapping into this lost chemical diversity could offer a potential source of new drugs.
Soil was key to making the Earth habitable.
EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo
What fossil records tell us about when the Earth was first covered by plants.
An ape that lived 21 million years ago was used to a habitat that was both grassy and wooded.
Corbin Rainbolt
Contrary to the idea that apes evolved their upright posture to reach for fruit in the forest canopy, the earliest known ape with this stature, Morotopithecus, lived in more open grassy environments.