Using the family relationships between single-celled protists alive today, researchers hypothesized what their evolutionary ancestors looked like – and then looked in the fossil record for matches.
It’s often said you need to look to the past to learn about the future, and that’s what the fossil record can tell about how the Tasmanian Devil survived in the past on mainland Australia.
The ocean floor holds unique information about Earth’s history. Scientific ocean drilling, which started 50 years ago, has yielded insights into climate change, geohazards and the key conditions for life.
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.
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.
2018 brought the announcement of a new geologic age that covers the last 4,200 years. How do scientists divide up Earth’s timeline and what do these demarcations mean?
Romain Garrouste, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) and 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.
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 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.
Sexual organs similar to what we see in sharks and rays today appeared many millions of years ago in much more primitive ancient fishes than was previously thought.
Did you recently hear news that Earth’s oldest pigments were hot pink? That’s not quite right. When they were in living bacteria a billion years ago, they were performing photosynthesis – and green.