A paper published in Science describes the discovery of Spinosaurus mirabilis, a new spinosaurid species found in Niger. A 20-person team led by Paul Sereno, Ph.D., Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, unearthed the find at a remote locale in the central Sahara, adding important new fossil finds to the closing chapter of spinosaurid evolution.
A fossil on display at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies reveals how dinosaurs in the Tyrannosaurus genus may have subdued prey, and the specimen is the focus of a new collaborative research publication between scientists at MSU and the University of Alberta in Canada. The giant carnivorous dinosaur Tyrannosaurus roamed the region that is now Montana at the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago. It lived alongside other large dinosaurs, including plant-eaters like Triceratops and the duck-billed Edmontosaurus.
A newly examined prehistoric shark from the age of dinosaurs provides surprising insights into the early evolution of modern sharks. It cannot be confidently assigned to any shark order that exists today and thus calls into question previous assumptions about the evolution of modern sharks.
Triceratops and similar horned dinosaurs had unusually large nasal cavities compared to most animals. Researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, used CT scans of fossilized Triceratops skulls and compared their structures with modern animals such as birds and crocodiles. Through direct observation and inference, researchers reconstructed how nerves, blood vessels and structures for airflow fit together in the skulls. They concluded horned dinosaurs probably used their noses not just for smelling but also to help control temperature and moisture. Their study is published in The Anatomical Record.
There aren’t any native lion or tiger populations living in Japan today, but this was not always the case. Fossil evidence indicates that at least one species of large cat roamed the archipelago during the Late Pleistocene—a period lasting from approximately 129,000 to 11,700 years ago. While researchers initially thought the fossils came from ancient tigers, new DNA evidence, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that the fossils actually came from an ancient species of lion.
A new species of crocodylomorph dating to about 215 million years ago has been described from the U.K. It has been called Galahadosuchus jonesi in recognition of David Rhys Jones, a secondary school physics teacher from Ysgol Uwchradd Aberteifi who gave inspiration and encouragement to one of the authors to pursue a career in science.
Researchers in Costa Rica have unearthed fossils from a mastodon and a giant sloth that lived as many as 40,000 years ago, officials announced Friday, calling it the biggest such find here in decades.
Gray wolves adapt their diets as a result of climate change, eating harder foods such as bones to extract nutrition during warmer climates, new research has found. The study, led by the University of Bristol in collaboration with the Natural History Museum, and published in Ecology Letters, has implications for wolf conservation across Europe and beyond.
An international research team led by Dr. Lorenzo Marchetti from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin has described the oldest known impressions of reptile skin from the Thuringian Forest in central Germany. Particularly remarkable is the possible preservation of a cloacal opening within the skin imprint. The fossils, dated to approximately 298 to 299 million years ago from the early Permian period, document detailed scale patterns of the stem group of modern reptiles for the first time. The results were published today in the journal Current Biology.
Islands are famous for producing some of the world’s strangest creatures, and now a new international study shows that the evolution of bird species on Hawaiian islands includes an ibis with unusually small eyes and limited visual capacity. The team from University of Lethbridge in Canada and Flinders University in Australia made the discovery while examining the skull of Apteribis, an extinct flightless ibis that once inhabited the Hawaiian islands.
Human activity has lessened the resilience of modern coral reefs by restricting the food-fueled energy flow that moves through the food chains of these critical ecosystems, reports an international team of researchers in the journal Nature. Examining otoliths—fish ear stones that are preserved in marine sediments across millennia—the team developed and applied a nitrogen isotope method to 7,000-year-old fossils in order to reconstruct ancient reef food webs directly for the first time, according to Boston College Senior Research Associate Jessica Lueders-Dumont, a lead researcher on the project.
Pythons are a common sight across much of Asia, especially in the tropical jungles and wetlands of countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. But one curious exception has been the main island of Taiwan, where there are none of these reptilian constrictors. So did they ever reach the island when sea levels were lower, or did they arrive and then vanish later?
Life on Earth started in the oceans. Sometime around 475 million years ago, plants began making their way from the water onto the land, and it took another 100 million years for the first animals with backbones to join them. But for tens of millions of years, these early land-dwelling creatures only ate their fellow animals, rather than grazing on greenery.
Before leaving on a fossil-hunting trip for a summer 2021 field paleontology class, a Montana State University junior made an apparently fate-tempting plea. “I kept joking through that whole class, ‘Oh, please, just anything but a turtle,'” said Jack Prall, now a doctoral student in MSU’s Department of Earth Sciences in the College of Letters and Science.
Most shark fossils are just teeth—their cartilage skeletons usually decay long before they can fossilize. But in northwestern Arkansas, a series of geological sites known as the Fayetteville Shale has preserved dozens of rare, three-dimensional shark skeletons dating back more than 300 million years. In a new study published in Geobios, researchers reveal why: These fossils formed on a low-oxygen, highly acidic seafloor that preserved cartilage instead of destroying it.
Oxygen is a vital and constant presence on Earth today. But that hasn’t always been the case. It wasn’t until around 2.3 billion years ago that oxygen became a permanent fixture in the atmosphere, during a pivotal period known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), which set the evolutionary course for oxygen-breathing life as we know it today. A new study by MIT researchers suggests some early forms of life may have evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before the GOE. The findings may represent some of the earliest evidence of aerobic respiration on Earth.
The fastest land animal in North America is the American pronghorn, and previously, researchers thought it evolved its speed because of pressure from the now-extinct American cheetah. But recently, that theory has come under fire. Now, a University of Michigan study examining fossilized ankle bones of ancient relatives of the American pronghorn has shown that the pronghorn was evolving to be faster more than 5 million years before the American cheetah appeared on the continent. The study is published in the Journal of Mammalogy.
New pieces have been added to the puzzle of the evolution of some of the oldest fish that lived on Earth more than 400 million years ago. In two separate studies, experts in Australia and China have found new clues about primitive lungfishes, the closest living relatives of land vertebrates. The new research builds on long-running work by Flinders University and other paleontologists in the fossil-rich Gogo site in Western Australia’s far north, and with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Flying is really hard work. Compared to walking, swimming, or running, flying is the form of movement that takes the most energy and requires the most calories. That means that birds have had to evolve specialized ways to be really efficient at finding and digesting their food.
University of Queensland research has confirmed Brisbane’s only dinosaur fossil is Australia’s oldest, dating back to the earliest part of the Late Triassic period 230 million years ago. The 18.5-centimeter footprint was discovered by a teenager at Petrie’s Quarry at Albion in 1958 but remained unstudied for more than 60 years.
An international team has described Foskeia pelendonum, a tiny Early Cretaceous ornithopod from Vegagete (Burgos, Spain), measuring barely half a meter long. Led by Paul-Emile Dieudonné (National University of Río Negro, Argentina), the study reveals an unexpectedly derived skull and positions Foskeia near the origin of the European herbivorous lineage Rhabdodontidae. The study is published in Papers in Palaeontology.
Southern Africa is world renowned for its fossil record of creatures that lived in the very distant past, including dinosaurs. But, about 182 million years ago, a huge eruption of lava covered much of the landscape (the inland Karoo Basin) where most of the dinosaurs roamed. After that, the dinosaur fossil record in the region goes abruptly quiet for the Jurassic Period (which lasted from 201 million to 145 million years ago).
New research conducted by paleontologists from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the CNRS (France) documents the earliest occurrence of a fossilized regurgitation produced by a strictly terrestrial predator from the early Permian Bromacker locality. Led by MfN doctoral researcher Arnaud Rebillard, the international team identified the bone content preserved within the regurgitation and discovered remains belonging to three animals of different species and body sizes.
Babies and very young sauropods—the long-necked, long-tailed plant-eaters that in adulthood were the largest animals to have ever walked on land—were a key food sustaining predators in the Late Jurassic, according to a new study led by a UCL (University College London) researcher.
Whether it’s digging up weathered bones from a paleontological site or reexamining forgotten trays in museum and university collections, the study of dinosaurs still throws up something new.
Australian and New Zealand scientists have unearthed the remains of ancient wildlife in a cave near Waitomo on Aotearoa’s North Island, the first time a large number of million-year-old fossils have been found—including an ancestor of the large flightless Kākāpō parrot.
Almost a hundred new animal species that survived a mass extinction event half a billion years ago have been discovered in a small quarry in China, scientists revealed Wednesday.
