Archaeology

Newly discovered Maya artwork illuminates an ancient clash

Long-sought clues to Maya governance emerge from an exquisitely preserved frieze

Books and recommendations from Scientific American

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.

The arguments over an ancient skeleton just won’t die 

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.