Fossils News

August 5, 2025

Top Headlines

The First Pandemic? Scientists Find 214 Ancient Pathogens in Prehistoric DNA

July 11, 2025 — Scientists have uncovered DNA from 214 ancient pathogens in prehistoric humans, including the oldest known evidence of plague. The findings show zoonotic diseases began spreading around 6,500 years ...

New Velvet Worm Species a First for the Arid Karoo

May 30, 2025 — A new species of velvet worm, Peripatopsis barnardi, represents the first ever species from the arid Karoo, which indicates that the area was likely historically more forested than at present. In the Cape Fold Mountains, we now know that every ...

New Method Provides the Key to Accessing Proteins in Ancient Human Remains

May 30, 2025 — A new method could soon unlock the vast repository of biological information held in the proteins of ancient soft tissues. The findings could open up a new era for palaeobiological ...

Dinosaurs Could Hold Key to Cancer Discoveries

May 29, 2025 — New techniques used to analyze soft tissue in dinosaur fossils may hold the key to new cancer discoveries. Researchers have analyzed dinosaur fossils using advanced paleoproteomic techniques, a method that holds promise for uncovering molecular data ...

Long Shot Science Leads to Revised Age for Land-Animal Ancestor

May 29, 2025 — The fossils of ancient salamander-like creatures in Scotland are among the most well-preserved examples of early stem tetrapods -- some of the first animals to make the transition from water to land. Thanks to new research, scientists believe that ...

Birds Nested in Arctic Alongside Dinosaurs

May 29, 2025 — Spring in the Arctic brings forth a plethora of peeps and downy hatchlings as millions of birds gather to raise their young. The same was true 73 million years ago, according to a new article. The paper documents the earliest-known example of birds ...

Rock Record Illuminates Oxygen History

May 29, 2025 — A new study reveals that the aerobic nitrogen cycle in the ocean may have occurred about 100 million years before oxygen began to significantly accumulate in the atmosphere, based on nitrogen isotope analysis from ancient South African rock cores. ...

Europe's Most Complete Stegosaurian Skull Unearthed in Teruel, Spain

May 29, 2025 — Palaeontologists have analyzed the most complete stegosaurian skull ever found in Europe and rewritten the evolutionary history of this iconic group of ...

Oldest Whale Bone Tools Discovered

May 28, 2025 — Humans were making tools from whale bones as far back as 20,000 years ago, according to a new study. This discovery broadens our understanding of early human use of whale remains and offers valuable insight into the marine ecology of the ...

Megalodon: The Broad Diet of the Megatooth Shark

May 26, 2025 — Contrary to widespread assumptions, the largest shark that ever lived -- Otodus megalodon -- fed on marine creatures at various levels of the food pyramid and not just the top. Scientists analyzed the zinc content of a large sample of fossilized ...

Mystery of 'Very Odd' Elasmosaur Finally Solved: Fiercely Predatory Marine Reptile Is New Species

May 23, 2025 — A mysterious sea monster fossil discovered decades ago in British Columbia has finally revealed its true identity — and it’s unlike anything scientists have seen before. Named Traskasaura ...

Toothache from Eating Something Cold? Blame These Ancient Fish

May 22, 2025 — New research shows that dentine, the inner layer of teeth that transmits sensory information to nerves inside the pulp, first evolved as sensory tissue in the armored exoskeletons of ancient ...

Latest Headlines

updated 1:25pm EDT

Crushing Vs. Slashing: New Skull Scans Reveal How Giant Dinosaurs Killed

Aug. 5, 2025 — Tyrannosaurus rex might be the most famous meat-eater of all time, but it turns out it wasn’t the only way to be a terrifying giant. New research shows that while T. rex evolved a skull designed ...

Scientists Reexamine 47-Year-Old Fossil and Discover a New Jurassic Sea Monster

Aug. 4, 2025 — A new long-necked marine reptile, Plesionectes longicollum, has been identified from a decades-old fossil found in Germany’s Posidonia Shale. The ...

400-Million-Year-Old Fish Exposes Big Mistake in How We Understood Evolution

July 29, 2025 — A fish thought to be evolution’s time capsule just surprised scientists. A detailed dissection of the coelacanth — a 400-million-year-old species ...

A Tiny Dinosaur Bone Just Rewrote the Origin of Bird Flight

July 24, 2025 — A tiny, overlooked wrist bone called the pisiform may have played a pivotal role in bird flight and it turns out it evolved far earlier than scientists thought. Fossils from bird-like dinosaurs in ...

A Dusty Fossil Drawer Held a 300-Million-Year-Old Evolutionary Game-Changer

July 24, 2025 — A century-old fossil long mislabeled as a caterpillar has been reidentified as the first-known nonmarine lobopodian—rewriting what we know about ancient life. Discovered in Harvard’s museum ...

A 500-Million-Year-Old Fossil Just Rewrote the Spider Origin Story

July 24, 2025 — Half a billion years ago, a strange sea-dwelling creature called Mollisonia symmetrica may have paved the way for modern spiders. Using detailed fossil brain analysis, researchers uncovered neural ...

Inside the Maya King’s Tomb That Rewrites Mesoamerican History

July 12, 2025 — A major breakthrough in Maya archaeology has emerged from Caracol, Belize, where the University of Houston team uncovered the tomb of Te K'ab Chaak—Caracol’s first known ruler. Buried with ...

Tiny Fossil With Razor Teeth Found by Student — Rewrites Mammal History

July 12, 2025 — A university student on a fossil-hunting field trip in Dorset made a stunning discovery: a 145-million-year-old jawbone belonging to a previously unknown mammal species with razor-like teeth. With ...

North America’s Oldest Pterosaur Unearthed in Arizona’s Triassic Time Capsule

July 9, 2025 — In the remote reaches of Arizona s Petrified Forest National Park, scientists have unearthed North America's oldest known pterosaur a small, ...

Buried for 23,000 Years: These Footprints Are Rewriting American History

June 29, 2025 — Footprints found in the ancient lakebeds of White Sands may prove that humans lived in North America 23,000 years ago — much earlier than previously believed. A new study using radiocarbon-dated ...

These 545-Million-Year-Old Fossil Trails Just Rewrote the Story of Evolution

June 27, 2025 — A groundbreaking study suggests that the famous Cambrian explosion—the dramatic burst of diverse animal life—might have actually started millions of years earlier than we thought. By analyzing ...

Mammals Didn't Walk Upright Until Late—here's What Fossils Reveal

June 25, 2025 — The shift from lizard-like sprawl to upright walking in mammals wasn’t a smooth climb up the evolutionary ladder. Instead, it was a messy saga full of unexpected detours. Using new bone-mapping ...

No Kings Buried Here: DNA Unravels the Myth of Incestuous Elites in Ancient Ireland

June 23, 2025 — DNA from a skull found at Newgrange once sparked theories of a royal incestuous elite in ancient Ireland, but new research reveals no signs of such a hierarchy. Instead, evidence suggests a ...

Monster Salamander With Powerful Jaws Unearthed in Tennessee Fossil Find

June 17, 2025 — A massive, extinct salamander with jaws like a vice once roamed ancient Tennessee and its fossil has just rewritten what we thought we knew about Appalachian amphibians. Named Dynamognathus ...

The 10,000-Mile March Through Fire That Made Dinosaurs Possible

June 13, 2025 — Despite Earth's most devastating mass extinction wiping out over 80% of marine life and half of land species, a group of early reptiles called archosauromorphs not only survived but thrived, ...

What a Dinosaur Ate 100 Million Years ago—Preserved in a Fossilized Time Capsule

June 10, 2025 — A prehistoric digestive time capsule has been unearthed in Australia: plant fossils found inside a sauropod dinosaur offer the first definitive glimpse into what these giant creatures actually ate. ...

160 Million Years Ago, This Fungus Pierced Trees Like a Microscopic Spear

June 8, 2025 — In a paper published in National Science Review, a Chinese team of scientists highlights the discovery of well-preserved blue-stain fungal hyphae within a Jurassic fossil wood from northeastern ...

Drone Tech Uncovers 1,000-Year-Old Native American Farms in Michigan

June 7, 2025 — In the dense forests of Michigan s Upper Peninsula, archaeologists have uncovered a massive ancient agricultural system that rewrites what we thought we knew about Native American farming. Dating ...

3,500-Year-Old Graves Reveal Secrets That Rewrite Bronze Age History

June 6, 2025 — Bronze Age life changed radically around 1500 BC in Central Europe. New research reveals diets narrowed, millet was introduced, migration slowed, and social systems became looser challenging old ...

Ancient DNA Used to Map Evolution of Fever-Causing Bacteria

May 22, 2025 — Researchers have analyzed ancient DNA from Borrelia recurrentis, a type of bacteria that causes relapsing fever, pinpointing when it evolved to spread through lice rather than ticks, and how it ...

Scientists Have Figured out How Extinct Giant Ground Sloths Got So Big and Where It All Went Wrong

May 22, 2025 — Scientists have analyzed ancient DNA and compared more than 400 fossils from 17 natural history museums to figure out how and why extinct sloths got so ...

'Selfish' Genes Called Introners Proven to Be a Major Source of Genetic Complexity

May 22, 2025 — A new study proves that a type of genetic element called 'introners' are the mechanism by which many introns spread within and between species, also providing evidence of eight instances in ...

Research Team Traces Evolutionary History of Bacterial Circadian Clock on Ancient Earth

May 20, 2025 — To better understand the circadian clock in modern-day cyanobacteria, a research team has studied ancient timekeeping systems. They examined the oscillation of the clock proteins KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC ...

Scientists Use Fossils to Assess the Health of Florida's Largest Remaining Seagrass Bed: Surprisingly, It's Doing Well!

May 15, 2025 — A new study shows that seagrass ecosystems along the northern half of Florida's Gulf Coast have remained relatively healthy and undisturbed for the last several thousand ...

Dexterity and Climbing Ability: How Ancient Human Relatives Used Their Hands

May 14, 2025 — Scientists have found new evidence for how our fossil human relatives in South Africa may have used their hands. Researchers investigated variation in finger bone morphology to determine that South ...

Fossil Tracks Show Reptiles Appeared on Earth Up to 40 Million Years Earlier

May 14, 2025 — The origin of reptiles on Earth has been shown to be up to 40 million years earlier than previously thought -- thanks to evidence discovered at an Australian fossil site that represents a critical ...

Australia's Oldest Prehistoric Tree Frog Hops 22 Million Years Back in Time

May 14, 2025 — Scientists have now discovered the oldest ancestor for all the Australian tree frogs, with distant links to the tree frogs of South ...

UV Light and CT Scans Helped Scientists Unlock Hidden Details in a Beautifully-Preserved Fossil Archaeopteryx

May 14, 2025 — Archaeopteryx is the fossil that clearly demonstrated Darwin's views. It's the oldest known fossil bird, and it helps show that all birds -- including the ones alive today -- emerged from ...

CT Scanning Helps Reveal Path from Rotten Fish to Fossil

May 13, 2025 — Scientists confirm CT scanning doesn't interfere with natural decomposition processes, opening new windows into understanding how fossils ...

Palaeontologists Discover 506-Million-Year-Old Predator

May 13, 2025 — Palaeontologists have discovered a remarkable new 506-million-year-old predator from the Burgess Shale of Canada. Mosura fentoni was about the size of your index finger and had three eyes, spiny ...