A 480 million year old fossil recently unearthed in Morocco fills in some of the evolutionary story for arthropods, members of the largest animal phylum on Earth.
Very few people today live a true hunter-gatherer lifestyle – and Paleo diets likely oversimplify what would have been on the table many millennia ago.
Thiery
Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something…
The feeding habits of an unusual 200-million-year-old fish have been tested in a ground-breaking study published in Palaeontology. This research is particularly notable as it wasn’t carried out by a leading…
Almost all natural history museums and recognised public collections of fossils have in the past relied on finds purchased from private collectors, and many still do. But the role of amateur fossil collectors…
Everywhere scientists look it seems like they are finding dinosaurs. A new species is emerging at the astounding pace of one per week. And this continues with the announcement of perhaps the strangest…
The hominid skull that gave rise to Homo floresiensis - but is it really a new species?
Flickr/NCSSM
Many people believe that what was found in Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia in 2003-2004 was some variety of hobbit-like human or prehuman. Our research published today argues that it…
The evolution of diet is intimately linked to human evolution: from the use of tools to break nuts, collect insects or hunt game, to the use of fire allowing more calories to be extracted from the food…
Fossils can tell us lots about animals – their size, age or sex, which is mostly physical characteristics. Evidence about how they may have behaved is rare. But the 240m-year-old fossil dung that I found…
Researchers have figured out for the first time what one dinosaur’s fleshy ‘crest’ looked like.
Julius Csotonyi
The discovery of soft-tissue comb remnants on a fossil could change the way we visualise dinosaurs. The findings, published today in Current Biology, concern the fossilised remains of an Edmontosaurus…
I’ve put on a bit of weight in the last 4 million years, obviously.
Mr Mo-Fo
The fossil record of early humans is punctuated by gaps, voids in our understanding of all the transitions from the common ancestor of humans and other apes to modern day Homo sapiens. While working in…
It should not be a surprise that East Africa was a hotbed of evolution, because over the last five million years everything about the landscape has changed. The extraordinary forces of plate tectonics…
Sauropods were huge animals, but why were they so massive - and did they really hold their necks like this?
Mark Witton
Alongside Tyrannosaurus rex, the basic sauropod dinosaur is one of the most iconic and instantly recognisable of prehistoric animals. Not only is their elegant shape with four columnar limbs, a long muscular…
Debate continues over how dinosaurs did the deed.
Miroslav Petrasko (blog.hdrshooter.net)
Dinosaurs were the largest animals to ever walk Earth, and they ruled the planet for more than 160 million years. The long-necked Argentinosaurus, with back vertebrae almost two metres high, possibly grew…
A reconstruction of a ptyctodontid fish, one of the groups of placoderms studied from which well-preserved muscles were found.
John A Long
Fossilised soft tissues, such as skin and muscle, are exceptionally hard to come by. When you think the chances of an animal being fossilised is less than one in a million - and these usually have only…
Australia is famous for its natural beauty: the Great Barrier Reef, Uluru, Kakadu, the Kimberley. But what about the places almost no one goes? We asked ecologists, biologists and wildlife researchers…
Semitransparent flesh reconstruction of an embryonic dinosaur inside an egg, with skeleton shown.
D Mazierski
We should forget about ever finding something as small and delicate as a dinosaur embryo, right? A few months ago I would have agreed – but now, well, things have changed. When my colleague, palaeontologist…