Paleontology News

April 24, 2024

Top Headlines

Researchers Find Oldest Undisputed Evidence of Earth's Magnetic Field

Apr. 24, 2024 — A new study has recovered a 3.7-billion-year-old record of Earth's magnetic field, and found that it appears remarkably similar to the field surrounding Earth ...

Fossil Frogs Share Their Skincare Secrets

Apr. 23, 2024 — Palaeontologists have solved a hundred-year-old mystery of how some fossil frogs preserve their fleshy parts -- it's all down to their skin. Palaeontologists studied 45-million-year-old fossil frogs from the Geiseltal site in central Germany. ...

Ice Age Climate Analysis Reduces Worst-Case Warming Expected from Rising CO2

Apr. 17, 2024 — A detailed reconstruction of climate during the most recent ice age, when a large swath of North America was covered in ice, provides information on the relationship between CO2 and global ...

Marine Plankton Behavior Could Predict Future Marine Extinctions

Apr. 17, 2024 — Marine communities migrated to Antarctica during the Earth's warmest period in 66 million years long before a mass-extinction ...

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Genetic Variant Identified That Shaped the Human Skull Base

Apr. 17, 2024 — Researchers have identified a variant in the gene TBX1 as key in the development of the unique morphology at the base of the skull. TBX1 is present at higher levels in humans than in closely related ...

Interspecies Competition Led to Even More Forms of Ancient Human -- Defying Evolutionary Trends in Vertebrates

Apr. 17, 2024 — Competition between species played a major role in the rise and fall of hominins -- and produced a 'bizarre' evolutionary pattern for the Homo ...

Paleontologists Unearth What May Be the Largest Known Marine Reptile

Apr. 17, 2024 — The fossilized remains of a second gigantic jawbone measuring more than two meters long has been found on a beach in Somerset, ...

Seed Ferns: Plants Experimented With Complex Leaf Vein Networks 201 Million Years Ago

Apr. 16, 2024 — According to a research team led by palaeontologists, the net-like leaf veining typical for today's flowering plants developed much earlier than ...

Digging Up New Species of Australia and New Guinea's Giant Fossil Kangaroos

Apr. 15, 2024 — Palaeontologists have described three unusual new species of giant fossil kangaroo from Australia and New Guinea, finding them more diverse in shape, range and hopping method than previously thought. ...

3D Mouth of an Ancient Jawless Fish Suggests They Were Filter-Feeders, Not Scavengers or Hunters

Apr. 10, 2024 — Early jawless fish were likely to have used bony projections surrounding their mouths to modify the mouth's shape while they collected food. Experts ...

Do Some Mysterious Bones Belong to Gigantic Ichthyosaurs?

Apr. 9, 2024 — Several similar large, fossilized bone fragments have been discovered in various regions across Western and Central Europe since the 19th century. The animal group to which they belonged is still the ...

In the Evolution of Walking, the Hip Bone Connected to the Rib Bones

Apr. 5, 2024 — A new reconstruction of the 375-million-year-old fossil fish Tiktaalik -- a close relative of limbed vertebrates -- used micro-CT to reveal bones still embedded in matrix. The reconstruction shows ...

Dinosaur Study Challenges Bergmann's Rule

Apr. 5, 2024 — A new study calls into question Bergmann's rule, an 1800s-era scientific principle stating that animals in high-latitude, cooler climates tend to be larger than close relatives living in warmer ...

Early Dinosaurs Grew Up Fast, but They Weren't the Only Ones

Apr. 3, 2024 — The earliest dinosaurs had rapid growth rates, but so did many of the other animals living alongside them, according to a new ...

We've Had Bird Evolution All Wrong

Apr. 3, 2024 — Genomic anamolies dating back to the time of the dinosaurs misled scientists about the evolutionary history of ...

New Step in Tectonic Squeeze That Turns Seafloor Into Mountains

Apr. 2, 2024 — Researchers describe zircons from the Andes mountains of Patagonia. Although the zircons formed when tectonic plates were colliding, they have a chemical signature associated with when the plates ...

In Paleontology, Correct Names Are Keys to Accurate Study

Mar. 26, 2024 — When the skeletal remains of a giant ground sloth were first unearthed in 1796, the discovery marked one of the earliest paleontological finds in American ...

New Archive of Ancient Human Brains Challenges Misconceptions of Soft Tissue Preservation

Mar. 25, 2024 — A new study has challenged previously held views that brain preservation in the archaeological record is extremely rare. The team compiled a new archive of preserved human brains, which highlighted ...

Research Uncovers a Rare Resin Fossil Find: A Spider That Aspires to Be an Ant

Mar. 22, 2024 — Spiders that disguise themselves as ants live in many locations around the globe but until now most had been able to avoid detection from fossil researchers as well as ...

Rays Were More Diverse 150 Million Years Ago Than Previously Thought

Mar. 21, 2024 — Scientists have explored the puzzling world of rays that lived 150 million years ago and discovered a previously hidden diversity -- including a new ray species. This study significantly expands the ...

Researchers Name Prehistoric Amphibian Ancestor Discovered in Smithsonian Collection After Kermit the Frog

Mar. 21, 2024 — Scientists have uncovered the fossilized skull of a 270-million-year-old ancient amphibian ancestor in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. The team of ...

Ancient Giant Dolphin Discovered in the Amazon

Mar. 20, 2024 — Measuring between 3 to 3.5 meters, 16 million years old: Paleontologists have announced the discovery of a new species of freshwater dolphin in the Peruvian Amazon region. Surprisingly, its closest ...

Sea Surface Temperature Research Provides Clear Evidence of Human-Caused Climate Change

Mar. 20, 2024 — Claims that climate change is natural are inconsistent with new oceanic temperature ...

Tanks of the Triassic: New Crocodile Ancestor Identified

Mar. 18, 2024 — Dinosaurs get all the glory. But aetosaurs, a heavily armored cousin of modern crocodiles, ruled the world before dinosaurs did. These tanks of the Triassic came in a variety of shapes and sizes ...

Alaska Dinosaur Tracks Reveal a Lush, Wet Environment

Mar. 12, 2024 — A large find of dinosaur tracks and fossilized plants and tree stumps in far northwestern Alaska provides new information about the climate and movement of animals near the time when they began ...

Higher Carnivorous Dinosaur Biodiversity of Famous Kem Kem Beds, Morocco

Mar. 12, 2024 — An international team of palaeontologists applied recently developed methods to measure theropod (carnivorous) dinosaur species diversity. The newly applied method uses both traditional phylogenetic ...

New Study Reveals Insight Into Which Animals Are Most Vulnerable to Extinction Due to Climate Change

Mar. 7, 2024 — In a new study, researchers have used the fossil record to better understand what factors make animals more vulnerable to extinction from climate change. The results could help to identify species ...

Earth's Earliest Forest Revealed in Somerset Fossils

Mar. 7, 2024 — The oldest fossilized forest known on Earth -- dating from 390 million years ago -- has been found in the high sandstone cliffs along the Devon and Somerset coast of South West ...

Fossils of Giant Sea Lizard With Dagger-Like Teeth Show How Our Oceans Have Fundamentally Changed Since the Dinosaur Era

Mar. 5, 2024 — Fossils of a strange new species of marine lizard with dagger-like teeth that lived 66 million years ago, show a dramatically more biodiverse ocean ecosystem to what we see ...

Fossil Named 'Attenborough's Strange Bird' Was the First in Its Kind Without Teeth

Mar. 5, 2024 — A new fossil, named 'Attenborough's strange bird' after naturalist and documentarian Sir David Attenborough, is the first of its kind to evolve a toothless beak. It's from a ...

Scientists ID Burned Bodies Using Technique Used for Extracting DNA from Woolly Mammoths, Neanderthals

Feb. 29, 2024 — A technique originally devised to extract DNA from woolly mammoths and other ancient archaeological specimens can be used to potentially identify badly burned human remains, according to ...

Mercury Rising: Study Sheds New Light on Ancient Volcanoes' Environmental Impact

Feb. 29, 2024 — Massive volcanic events in Earth's history that released large amounts of carbon into the atmosphere frequently correlate with periods of severe environmental change and mass extinctions. A new ...

Slimming Down a Colossal Fossil Whale

Feb. 29, 2024 — A 30 million year-old fossil whale may not be the heaviest animal of all time after all, according to a new analysis by paleontologists. The new analysis puts Perucetus colossus back in the same ...

Panama Canal Expansion Rewrites History of World's Most Ecologically Diverse Bats

Feb. 20, 2024 — In a new study, paleontologists describe the oldest-known leaf-nosed bat fossils, which were found along the banks of the Panama Canal. They're also the oldest bat fossils from Central America, ...