Paleontology News

Oct 11, 2011 by James Freeman

Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain, or so it seemed before Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark McMenamin took a look at some of their remains in Nevada. Now he thinks there was an even larger and more cunning sea monster that preyed on ichthyosaurs: a kraken of such...

Sep 26, 2011 by James Freeman

Researchers have determined that two unusual wasps in amber found in New Jersey, USA represent a new family of wasps, according to a press release from...

Sep 14, 2011 by James Freeman

Researchers announced the discovery of a new species of large predatory fish that prowled ancient North American waterways during the Devonian Period,...

Sep 7, 2011 by James Freeman

Scientists from Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Tianyu Museum of Nature in Shandong Province, China, and University of Kansas...

Sep 2, 2011 by James Freeman

The extinction of Ice Age giants such as woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant sloths and saber-toothed cats has been widely studied, but much less is...

Aug 31, 2011 by James Freeman

A well-preserved fossil discovered in northeast China provides new information about the earliest ancestors of most of today’s mammal species. According...

Aug 23, 2011 by James Freeman

Harvard researchers have found that practice of processing food through cooking was likely invented by human’s early ancestors more than 1.9 million...

Aug 22, 2011 by James Freeman

The oldest fossil evidence for early life has been discovered in micrometre-sized pyrite crystals from the Strelley Pool Formation in Western Australia,...

Aug 16, 2011 by James Freeman

In a new study co-authored by University of Florida scientists, researchers recovered and analyzed the oldest fossil evidence of fingernails in modern...

Aug 10, 2011 by James Freeman

Paleontologists have discovered a group of more than 20 polar dinosaur tracks on the coast of Victoria, Australia, offering a rare glimpse into animal...