Archaeology

Scientists have long thought of the Cambrian Explosion 541 million years ago as the flowering of complex life on Earth. Strangely shaped, large soft-bodied organisms were known to have lived in the period just prior — the Ediacaran — but they made few hard parts and scientists have debated whether any or how many were [...]

Long cloaked in mystery, the ancient Teotihuacán culture is at last giving up its secrets

After decades of investigation, fresh clues are emerging from Mexico’s City of Gods

Protoceratops © by John Conway, from All Yesterdays As someone fascinated by prehistoric life during my entire existence, my love for paleoart is experiencing something of a renaissance: I have children now.

By analyzing what came out of Neandertals, researchers have verified that at least some of them mixed vegetation into their meaty diet. Cynthia Graber reports 

 

If you pay any attention to the world of zoological research (as you will do, given that you're reading a blog called Tetrapod Zoology), you'll know that the study of anatomy has very much come to the fore in recent years.

No time to finish anything new, gah. In desperation, here’s a classic article from the Tet Zoo archives, originally published in March 2009.

A metabolic analysis suggests that dinosaurs could regulate their body temperatures, but only to a point

High terrains might have been the training ground for cold adaptation before the Ice Age struck

Crocodiles, alligators and gharials are the modern members of a far grander, far more diverse clade of archosaurian reptiles termed Crocodylomorpha.

Isotope composition within fish tails found in London archaeological digs shows that the city began importing cod from northern Scandinavia some 800 years ago. Cynthia Graber reports

 

A juvenile tick trapped in a 15-million- to 20-million-year-old piece of amber contains a bacterium that could be the oldest documented ancestor of the microbe that causes Lyme disease