The challenge we face after a century of extraordinary discoveries is pinning down the lineage and mapping the evolutionary route through which we as human beings got here.
A great white shark captured off the coast of Mexico.
Flickr/Brook Ward
We used to think of sharks as primitive fish because the had cartilage instead of bones. Turns out there was a good reason why and it makes them anything but primitive.
How Archaeornithura might have looked.
Zongda Zhang
Metoposaurus algarvensis, aka toilet jaws, was all over our early ancestors. The thing that got us off the hook? A big hot interception 200m years ago.
Artist’s reconstruction of the giant filter-feeding anomalocaridid Aegirocassis benmoulae from 480 million years ago.
Marianne Collins, ArtofFact
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.
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…
Some 220m years ago, the Triassic Period marked the beginning of the age of dinosaurs. But by the time the earliest dinosaurs were just starting to appear in the fossil record, it was distant relatives…
Palaeontologists have discovered an unusual aquatic parasite from Jurassic-era China. Jun Chen from Linyi University and…
A bull male Eastmanosteus placoderm. Placoderms were the first creatures to evolve paired reproductive organs with a bony skeleton called claspers.
Brian Choo & John Long, Flinders University.
We humans use the euphemism for sex that “we like to get a leg over” but the first jawed vertebrates – the placoderms – they liked to get a leg in. They were the first back-boned creatures to evolve male…
Chinese researchers have announced the rare discovery of fossilised pterosaur eggs. Xiaolin Wang from the Chinese Academy…
The Lark Quarry dinosaur trackway is the world’s only fossilised dinosaur stampede. But the fossils could fetch a lot of money if sold, so how do we keep them safe?
AAP/Tourism Queensland
Collecting fossils helps raise interest in palaeontology and the natural history of Australia, and many important fossil discoveries have been made by members of the public collecting unusual specimens…
In a recent paper in Nature, we described a strange marine animal, called Tamisiocaris. They were giants that swam in the oceans over 500 million years ago. They had strange looking appendages on their…
Life as we know it is carbon-based, that is, organic. These organic molecules containing mostly carbon and hydrogen are delicate to the ravages of time, relatively speaking. They aren’t usually preserved…
Owls and birds of prey spew bones and remains, which are extremely useful for determining local extinction patterns.
Flickr/Georgie Sharp
The impact of European settlement on Australia was so massive that many mammals disappeared before anyone noticed they were there, but fossils from the past 10,000 years offer excellent evidence of pre-European…
Why did they always have to go in groups?
Martin Ezcurra
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…
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…