In the dinosaur era, flying reptiles soared in the skies of what is now Australia – but we have barely any fossil records of them.
The oldest known footprint of our species, lightly ringed with chalk. It appears long and narrow because the trackmaker dragged their heel.
Charles Helm
Ancient microbes likely produced natural products their descendants today do not. Tapping into this lost chemical diversity could offer a potential source of new drugs.
Soil was key to making the Earth habitable.
EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo
Contrary to the idea that apes evolved their upright posture to reach for fruit in the forest canopy, the earliest known ape with this stature, Morotopithecus, lived in more open grassy environments.
Life reconstruction of the head of the Australian sauropod Diamantinasaurus matildae.
Elena Marian
Researchers are analyzing the fossil cranium of a Smilodon fatalis that lived more than 13,000 years ago to learn more about the lifestyle of this iconic big cat.
Dinosaurs once dominated Earth’s landscapes.
AmeliAU/Shutterstock
The largest birds that ever lived on Earth, elephant birds have a spotty fossil record. But understanding them could help protect Madagascar’s biodiversity.
Maybe the first life on Earth was part of an ‘RNA world.’
Artur Plawgo/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
Fossil evidence of how the earliest life on Earth came to be is hard to come by. But scientists have come up with a few theories based on the microbes, viruses and prions existing today.
The building blocks of the Giza pyramids contain trillions of fossilised remains of an ocean-dwelling organism called foraminifera.
Sui Xiankai/Xinhua via Getty Images
The Wapiti Formation in Alberta is turning out to be a rich site for dinosaur and other fossils. A recent discovery could fill in the gaps about a transition between different ecological communities.
Ancient rocks from Western Australia may not contain the world’s oldest fossils – but they do preserve organic compounds that may have formed the raw materials for the first living cells.
Researchers have found evidence that primates colonised northern Canada 52 million years ago.
Kaca Skokanova/Shutterstock