Paleontology News

Apr 27, 2026 by News Staff

Massive, soft-bodied cephalopods up to 19 m (62 feet) long rivaled — and perhaps hunted — the ocean’s fiercest reptiles in the Cretaceous period, according to new research led by Hokkaido University paleontologists. An artist’s impression of an ancient giant octopus. Image credit: Yohei Utsuki, Hokkaido University. For hundreds of millions of years, marine ecosystems were thought to be dominated by large vertebrate apex predators....

Apr 23, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists in Brazil have identified a new genus and species of hyperodapedontine rhynchosaur — an extinct lineage of beaked, herbivorous reptiles...

Apr 21, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists have identified a new genus and species of soft-bodied, tubicolous polyp medusozoan from well-preserved specimens found about 50 km northeast...

Apr 20, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

CT scans of a decades-old specimen from the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History show a new species of short-snouted crocodylomorph with unusually strong...

Apr 17, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

A new genus and species of carnivorous herrerasaurian dinosaur has been described from an incomplete but well-preserved skull found in northern New Mexico,...

Apr 15, 2026 by News Staff

New research shows that the large-bodied ornithopod dinosaur Muttaburrasaurus langdoni from the mid-Cretaceous of Australia was no ordinary herbivore....

Apr 15, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Echidna fossils in Australia are rare and unevenly distributed across time and geography. In a new paper published in The Alcheringa, an Australasian Journal...

New trace fossil discoveries from the half-billion-year-old Cambrian tidal flats of Wisconsin at a site called Blackberry Hill continue to paint the picture...

Apr 10, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Using high-resolution CT and synchrotron scanning, paleontologists confirmed that the fossilized specimen from the Early Triassic of the South African...

Apr 8, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists have examined 289-million-year-old specimens of the early reptile Captorhinus aguti that preserve a covering of three-dimensional skin,...

Apr 8, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Pohlsepia mazonensis, a cephalopod species first described in 2000 from a 300-million-year-old specimen and featured in the Guinness Book of Records as...

Apr 6, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

An assemblage of more than 700 Ediacaran fossils from the end of the Ediacaran period indicates that key animal groups — including early relatives...

Apr 3, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Deep inside a limestone cave in western Cuba, paleontologists have found the most complete ichthyosaur skeleton yet found on the island. Ophthalmosaurid...

Apr 2, 2026 by Natali Anderson

In a paper published online March 18 in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica, paleontologists described a new species of harvestman found in two pieces...

Apr 1, 2026 by News Staff

Paleontologists at Harvard University have described a large predatory arthropod from the Middle Cambrian of Utah featuring massive three-segmented chelicerae....

Mar 30, 2026 by News Staff

Long thought to be fueled by increased atmospheric oxygen concentration, enormous griffinflies from the Carboniferous period, 300 million years ago, may...

Mar 30, 2026 by News Staff

An analysis of two 240-million-year-old coelacanth fossils suggests a bizarre sensory adaptation: an ossified lung that transmitted sound to the inner...

Mar 29, 2026 by News Staff

Paleontologists have identified a new genus and species of fossil ape that lived about 17-18 million years ago in northern Egypt. The discovery suggests...

Mar 26, 2026 by News Staff

Scientists have extracted and analyzed DNA from 216 canid remains, including 181 from Paleolithic and Mesolithic Europe. The oldest data that they recovered...

Mar 23, 2026 by Sergio Prostak

Known from a single skull discovered in South Africa in 1952, Cistecynodon parvus has been shuffled across the evolutionary tree: described at various...