To a human, two billion years is an unfathomable interval. But that, a team of European, Gabonese, and American scientists now say, is how long ago a recently discovered hoard of fossils suggests Earth’s first big life evolved — large enough to see with the naked eye, and in a spectrum of forms that tease [...]..
Hadrosaurs could outrun tyrannosaurusesbecause of the layout of the herbivores’ tail muscles
Midway through the school year, parents and teachers are starting to plan (and fundraise) for winter and spring field trips. Among the most popular destinations is the science museum.
Scientists are using exotic technologies to excavate underwater shipwrecks with the same precision as an archaeological dig
Books and recommendations from Scientific American
Long-sought clues to Maya governance emerge from an exquisitely preserved frieze
Newly discovered Maya artwork illuminates an ancient clash
It is getting harder and harder to figure out what distinguished Homo sapiens from other members of the human family and fueled our extraordinary success as a species.
Paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson's first glimpse of Lucy came on November 24, 1974
Forty years ago today, a young American paleoanthropologist named Donald Johanson made the discovery of a lifetime in the arid badlands of Ethiopia's remote Afar region: a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton of a small-brained creature that walked upright like we do...
Scientists will examine the mammoth to learn whether it will yield enough undamaged DNA to make cloning the extinct creature a reality
A nebulous trade in forged and illegal fossils is an ever-growing headache for paleontologists
Regular readers will know that I have a major interest in ichthyosaurs, the so-called fish-lizards of the Mesozoic (see links below). As you'll know if you keep your finger on the pulse of Mesozoic reptile news, last week saw the publication of a really interesting new animal from the Lower Triassic: the Chinese `proto-ichthyosaur' Cartorhynchus [...]..
BERLIN: The former oil shale mining site of Messel, near Frankfurt, Germany, is well known for its spectacular fossils of organisms that lived between 47 million and 48 million years ago, during the Eocene epoch...
Rooms beneath the mysterious city contain jade statues, jaguar remains and thousands of other objects
It defies belief, but a 180 million year old fern fossil unearthed in Sweden is so exquisitely preserved that it is possible to see its cells dividing.
In October 2004 paleontologists announced a new human species called Homo floresiensis . Ever since then debate has raged on whether it truly is a new species or merely a diseased Homo sapiens...
An analysis of the oldest known DNA from a human reveals a mysterious group that roamed northern Asia
The waddling Deinocheirus was almost as big as Tyrannosaurus rex
Hey, Darren, how's it going with that plan to discuss all the fossil crocodylomorph groups? Huh? Well, ha ha, it ain't going so well… goddam life getting in the way of my blogging...
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