Archaeology

A new fossil discovery could shed light on why the number of penguin species plummeted on Africa's coastline from four species 5 million years ago to just one today—the jackass penguin

A dating technique has pinned down four volcanic eruptions that may have triggered the extinction event that cleared the way for dinosaurs to dominate Earth for the next 135 million years

Despite detailed descriptions by Herodotus, very few mummies, if any, were eviscerated with cedar oil enemas, research suggests

More than three quarters of the adults showed signs of degenerative joint disease, likely from hauling heavy loads, and about two thirds of these adults had at least one broken bone

The fossils, three million years older than previous remains found to date, reveal that early colobine monkeys apparently coexisted with other, more archaic primates. Competition with colobines could have helped drive the other groups to extinction

De-extinction hopes to revive mammoths, gastric frogs and other missing species, but it might undermine the conservation of creatures that still survive

The new find solves a puzzle about where these big-fanged felines arose

Two-winged flight followed the emergence of avian ancestors

Fossil caiman skulls found in Panama raise questions about the distance between South and Central America at the beginning of the Miocene epoch. Sophie Bushwick reports

Antarctica was flat, warm and crisscrossed with rivers before glaciers buzz-sawed its steep valley

Doctors in medieval Europe weren't as idle as it may seem, as a new analysis of the oldest-known preserved human dissection in Europe reveals

An analysis of Richard I's heart shows that Christians in the Middle Ages embalmed, which the Church has tried to downplay due to the practice's pagan origins