Paleontology News

May 8, 2015 by News Staff

Dr Javier Ortega-Hernández of the University of Cambridge, UK, has discovered one of the oldest fossil brains ever found, and used it to help identify a key point in the evolutionary transition from soft to hard bodies in early ancestors of arthropods. Odaraia alata, a large swimming arthropod with a pair of bulbous eyes and a tubular carapace open ventrally. Image credit: Jean Bernard Caron, Royal Ontario Museum. Dr Ortega-Hernández looked at two...

May 6, 2015 by News Staff

An international team of paleontologists has described a new ornithuromorph bird that lived during the Hauterivian stage of the Early Cretaceous epoch,...

Apr 30, 2015 by News Staff

A team of paleontologists, co-led by Dr Xing Xu and Dr Xiaoting Zheng of the Linyi University’s Institute of Geology and Paleontology, has discovered...

Apr 28, 2015 by News Staff

An international team of paleontologists led by Dr Fernando Novas of the Bernardino Rivadavia Natural Sciences Museum in Buenos Aires has described a new...

Apr 23, 2015 by News Staff

According to paleontologist Evan Saitta of the University of Bristol, UK, stegosaur plates may have differed between males and females. Silhouettes of...

Apr 16, 2015 by News Staff

In a new paper in the journal Biology Letters, scientists reported fossil traces of Osedax – a genus of bone-devouring worms that both eat and inhabit...

Apr 11, 2015 by News Staff

A team of paleontologists led by Dr Adam Behlke of Yale University says that very large marine reptiles called mosasaurs did not lay eggs on beaches, and...

Apr 10, 2015 by News Staff

A group of paleontologists has described a new genus and species of Phorusrhacidae that lived in what is now Argentina during the Pliocene epoch, around...

Apr 9, 2015 by News Staff

The evidence comes from paleontologists Dr David Hone of Queen Mary University of London and Dr Darren Tanke of the Royal Tyrrell Museum who analyzed a...

Apr 7, 2015 by Enrico de Lazaro

Since the early 1900s, paleontologists have believed that the dinosaur genus Brontosaurus (thunder lizard) was in fact the Apatosaurus. Now, a new study,...

Apr 3, 2015 by News Staff

A mass extinction some 201 million years ago may have been triggered by changes in the biochemical balance of Panthalassa (also known as the Panthalassic...

Apr 2, 2015 by News Staff

San Jose State University researcher Dr Jonathan Hendricks has used ultraviolet (UV) light to reveal and characterize the original shell coloration patterns...

Mar 31, 2015 by News Staff

A team of scientists from China, Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom, has described a new genus and species of an ensign scale insect from mid-Cretaceous...

Mar 28, 2015 by News Staff

A multinational group of paleontologists has described a prehistoric lobster-like animal from the Marble Canyon site, part of the renowned Canadian Burgess...

Mar 24, 2015 by News Staff

A team of scientists led by Dr Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh, UK, has discovered a new species of metoposaurus that lived in lakes and...

Mar 19, 2015 by News Staff

According to a team of scientists headed by Dr Ross MacPhee from the American Museum of Natural History, South American native ungulates – the last...

Mar 19, 2015 by News Staff

A new species of prehistoric crocodile that dates back 231 million years ago (Carnian stage of the Triassic period) has been identified by a team of paleontologists...

Mar 17, 2015 by News Staff

Uplift associated with the East Africa’s Great Rift Valley has puzzled scientists for many years because the timing and starting elevation have been...

Mar 12, 2015 by News Staff

Paleontologists have discovered fossils of a 2-m-long lobster-like animal that lived in the seas of what is now Morocco during the early Ordovician period,...

Mar 4, 2015 by News Staff

The well-preserved 150-million-year-old specimen of the herbivorous dinosaur Stegosaurus stenops – now in the Natural History Museum, London, UK –...