Massospondylus skeleton.
Courtesy Dr K Chapelle.
Some time between 1100 and 1700 AD, a Massospondylus bone was discovered and carried to a rock shelter in Lesotho.
Elephants communicate underground by generating seismic waves.
Anadolu Agency
Elephants can be viewed as geological engineers that create minor tectonic forces on the substrate they walk on.
The baleen whale fossil at Museums Victoria Research Institute.
Eugene Hyland, Museums Victoria
A newly described fossil from South Australia is making waves in our understanding of where and when whales evolved titanic body sizes.
Jacob Lund/Shutterstock
Impress your niece or nephew with these T rex facts.
Rattana/Shutterstock
New laboratory experiments add analytical rigour to the search for ancient biomolecules
Shutterstock
Small holes in baby dinosaur bones add to the growing mass of evidence that the ancient creatures were warm-blooded and highly active.
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’.