Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for about 180 million years. But around 66 million years ago, a huge rock from outer space (called an asteroid) smashed into the Earth. Then things got worse for dinosaurs.
A modern mouse lemur Microcebus sits upon the cranium of an extinct Megaladapis lemur.
Dao Van Hoang www.daovanhoang.com
A series of new studies sheds light on the population crash and extinction of the giant birds, lemurs and more that roamed the island until around A.D. 700-1000.
Exceptionally well preserved 500m year old fossils show Cambrian seas were more diverse than scientists had thought.
The fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus, known as the Taung Child, is among South Africa’s most famous fossils.
Image courtesy of PAST
Twenty-two years ago, President Clinton established Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument for paleontological conservation. As the Trump administration shrinks its borders, that mission is jeopardized.
With a lot not on display, museums may not even know all that’s in their vast holdings.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
A tiny percentage of museums’ natural history holdings are on display. Very little of these vast archives is digitized and available online. But museums are working to change that.
Romain Garrouste, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) e André Nel, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN)
They hovered in the skies of the Earth 300 million years ago… The giant dragonflies will soon be the stars of the paleontology gallery of France’s Natural History Museum in Paris.
Dinosaurs had some bad luck, but sooner or later extinction comes for all of us.
rawpixel/Unsplash.com
Death is inevitable for individuals and also for species. With help from the fossil record, paleontologists are piecing together what might make one creature more vulnerable than another.
We’re gonna need an even bigger boat.
Shutterstock
Strange frond-like sea creatures are among the planet’s earliest animals, but new research dates them and the entire animal kingdom to much earlier than first thought.
If you discovered a new type of dinosaur, what would you name it?
Mavis Wong CC-BY-ND
We know of about 900 valid dinosaur species that existed. ‘Valid’ means scientists know the dinosaur from enough of the skeleton bones to feel pretty sure that it differs from other known dinosaurs.
Reconstruction of the bite wound affecting the shoulder of our herbivorous dinosaur.
Zongda Zhang/Lida Xing
New research uses pathology in dinosaur bones to look at predator-prey interactions in the fossil record.
The Spinosaurus was just one example of a dinosaur that roamed Africa hundreds of millions of years ago.
By Mike Bowler from Canada (Spinosaurus) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
With no identifiable body parts, it’s hard to know how these fossilized creatures lived. A new approach models how the ocean’s water would interact with their unique shapes – hinting at their lifestyle.
The stone flakes are flying, but what brain regions are firing?
Shelby S. Putt
We can’t observe the brain activity of extinct human species. But we can observe modern brains doing the things that our distant ancestors did, looking for clues about how ancient brains worked.
When new discoveries are jealously guarded under lock and key, science suffers.
Andy Wright
Anthropologists gather clues about how our ancient ancestors lived from their teeth. What will future anthropologists make of us based on the fossilized pearly whites we’ll leave behind?
The author’s backpack was hiding this almost complete therapsid fossil. Was finding it all down to luck?
Julien Benoit
Good science isn’t rooted in chance. It’s based on people with expertise being in the right place at the right time, equipped with enough knowledge to know what they’re looking at.
Eoanthropus dawsoni, or the Piltdown Man, never really existed.
Wikimedia/Wellcome Images
One of paleontology’s most notorious hoaxes has long been blamed on a serial forger named Charles Dawson. But might a Jesuit priest have been in on a joke that went wrong ?