Two-million-year-old fossils were recently discovered in the Petrified Forest on the Greek island of Lesvos, indicating that horses, cattle, deer, and antelope formerly grazed its green slopes.
A strange enormous kangaroo roamed the steep jungles of New Guinea long ago, practically until the end of the last ice age. According to new studies, this kangaroo was not closely linked to present Australian kangaroos. Rather, it is a previously unknown species of primitive kangaroo found only in New Guinea.
Two mysteries have been a head-scratcher for many paleoclimate experts: Where did the last ice age’s ice sheets come from, and how did they grow so fast? These puzzles may have been clarified by a recent study that was published in Nature Geoscience and offered an answer. These results could potentially be used to understand previous glacial epochs.
A virtually complete skeleton of the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) animal Leiochelys tokaryki has been discovered. Tim Tokaryk, a former curator of paleontology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, is honored with the new turtle species’ name.
Many of our questions about how they lived and what they were like would be answered if we lived in a world where tourists could travel to a remote island resort and see living dinosaurs — or run for from them, as in Jurassic World. Unfortunately, we must rely on information gleaned from fossil remains preserved in rock tens of millions of years ago.
Scientists say they’ve uncovered the remains of Europe’s largest-ever terrestrial dinosaur on the Isle of Wight.
The long necks of giraffes have been presented as a prime illustration of natural selection for years. A freshly discovered fossil girraffoid, on the other hand, suggests a new hypothesis.
According to researchers, a 390 million-year-old fish discovered in a Caithness graveyard is one of the early relatives of four-limbed mammals, including humans.
Did they walk on their toes like today’s dogs? Did they burrow in the ground or live in trees? What food did they prey on and what animals preyed upon them? How did they relate to extinct doglike species that came before them? And, potentially, is this an entirely new undiscovered species? This new fossil is providing SDNHM scientists with a few more pieces of an incomplete evolutionary puzzle.
Plankton’s endurance to prior global warming events is revealed by the discovery of “ghost” fossils.
An multinational team of experts from the Natural History Museum, UCL (University College London), the University of Florence, and the Swedish Museum of Natural History discovered a unique sort of fossilisation that had previously gone unnoticed.
The ‘ghost’ fossils are imprints of coccolithophores, which are single-celled plankton. Their discovery is altering our understanding of how climate change affects plankton in the oceans.