Exploring Prehistoric Life
A research study sheds new light upon an ongoing debate among conservation biologists: whether we should conserve sets of endangered species, or whether we should preserve ecosystem functioning, that is, the processes inherent to ecosystems, including those that...
A team of researchers from several institutions dubbed a 6.7-foot-long shark that lived 300 million years ago “Godzilla Shark” after discovering a fossilized skeleton in the Manzano Mountains about 30 miles southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Paleontologists have found that the thin neck vertebrae of the azhdarchid pterosaurs got their strength from an intricate internal structure.
Paleontologists have found an exceptionally preserved short-winged flower beetle and associated pollen aggregations and coprolites in a piece of mid-Cretaceous...
Opposed thumbs are adaptations to arboreal life and rare for non-mammal vertebrates; Kunpengopterus antipollicatus, a newly-discovered species of arboreal pterosaur that inhabited a unique forest ecosystem in what is now China during the...
Gray wolves (Canis lupus) from the Yukon Territory, Canada, survived the extinction at the end of the last Ice Age by adapting their diet over thousands of years — from a primary reliance on ...
A fossil of a skunk-like mammal that lived during the age of dinosaurs has been discovered in Chilean Patagonia, adding further proof to recent evidence that mammals roamed that part of South America a lot earlier than previously thought.
Fossiomanus sinensis and Jueconodon cheni, two distantly related species of mammaliamorphs that lived some 120 million years ago (Early...
120-million-year-old animals evolved "scratch-digging" traits independently.
Fossil discoveries often help answer long-standing questions about how our modern world came to be. However, sometimes they only deepen the mystery -- as a recent discovery of four new species of ancient insects in British Columbia and Washington state is proving...