Stories by Riley Black

An ancient frog, bird and dinosaur wore elusive yellow and orange shades, a new lab technique reveals

Ancient fish followed prey into the crushing pressures of the deep ocean

A key genetic mutation—harmful in humans—may have opened the sky to bats

Early mammals got ahead by eating insects

An extensive system of air sacs, evolved over and over, let dinosaurs grow larger without sacrificing strength

This ancient creature swam in surprisingly modern seas

Fossil trackways may show tyrannosaur tykes teaming up

Walking on all fours helped shape the panda's “thumb”

A small, speedy, omnivorous dinosaur was a forerunner of Brachiosaurus and other giant plant-eaters 

New fossil analysis offers the first physical evidence of this launch strategy

Fossil animals’ inner ear structures offer clues on when endothermy, or warm-bloodedness, evolved

Some species were constrained by their food sources, while others ranged widely

An amazingly well-preserved fossil suggests the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs also had some type of feather or feather precursor

A related lineage’s explosive growth leaves just one descendant today

New evidence suggests an origin to an exceptionally hot period in Earth’s history

Fangs evolved over and over because of this groovy process

Seeds found in fossilized tracks fuel new speculation about when—and how—people arrived

Piecing together a paleontological puzzle

When the sun disappeared, tiny coccoliths turned to hunting

Life’s great radiations do not always line up with mass extinctions, a new study shows

The extinct giant canids were a remarkable example of convergent evolution

Ancient DNA preserved in soil may rewrite what we thought about the Ice Age

Fossils of small, delicate animals may reveal the early history of gigantic flying reptiles

Debate erupts over how best to estimate the sizes of the largest creatures ever to have walked the earth