Kayentapus ambrokholohali footprints belong to an animal of about 26 feet long, dwarfing all the life around it.
Theropod image adapted by Lara Sciscio, with permission, from an illustration by Scott Hartman
Maeve, age 8, has a question that has stumped many scientists over the years. And that’s because it’s a surprisingly tricky question to answer. It depends a bit on what you mean by ‘person’.
The Valley of the Kings in ancient Egypt proved a useful testing ground for examples of osteoarthritis.
Anne Austin
Bones and texts showed how decades of strenuous hikes led to higher levels of osteoarthritis in workers’ knees and ankles in an ancient Egyptian village.
Research of ancient DNA has tended to ignore previous studies about the bones themselves.
Reuters/Siphiwe Sibeko
A rush of ancient DNA projects in Africa has presented the curators of archaeological skeletons with ethical issues because research requires the destruction of human bone.
Reconstruction of an adult basal cynodont with its young.
Image by James Stemler
The Moschops fossil was discovered in South Africa in 1911 and a new study of a complete skull shows how its dense braincase protected the brain and sense organs during head-to-head combat.
Lida Ajer cave - a small but well decorated front entrance.
Julien Louys
The evidence of a much earlier presence of humans in Indonesia was found more than 100 years ago. But only now has the age of the fossil teeth been accurately dated.
How the mighty dinosaurs would have walked millions of years ago.
Flickr/Ørjan Hoyd Vøllestad
The location of a dinosaur find on a remote Queensland sheep station was lost for almost 80 years. But the site was rediscovered, and details are now emerging about the make up of the new dinosaur.
Homo naledi seems to have enjoyed small, hard foods like nuts.
Ken in the field with his team from the ANU in 1990 at Gogo (left to right) Dr Peter Pridmore, Prof Ken Campbell, Mrs Val Elder and Dr Richard Barwick.
John Long
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.
Computed tomography scans of a frog skeleton. These fossil frogs are useful to track climatic change.
Author supplied
Fossils of the lowly frog indicate that the evolution of South Africa’s west coast winter rainfall pattern is more complex, and possibly occurred much later, than previously thought
Hypothetical reconstruction of the largest extinct megapode, Progura gallinacea (right), with a modern Brush-turkey and a Grey Kangaroo.
Artwork by E. Shute, from photos by Tony Rudd, Kim Benson and Aaron Camens
Large birds once lived across Australia, only to become extinct around the time that giant marsupials and other megafauna died out during the Pleistocene “ice ages”.
Children gather around a fossil skull at a South African museum.
EPA/Jon Hrusa
As an intellectual history of the disciplines of paleontology and paleoanthropology, Kuljan’s book is especially adept at narrating the interwoven connections between science and power.
A new, “baby dragon” dinosaur revealed in a fossil returned to China is a striking example of the discoveries that might be lost when scientific specimens are illegally removed and traded.
Local people at Tendaguru (Tanzania) excavation site in 1909 with Giraffatitan fossils.
Wikimedia Commons/Public domain
Africa has one of the world’s richest fossil records, and evidence suggests that amateurs collected really important fossils long before professionals arrived on the scene.