Paleontology

Geneticist Svante Pääbo reconstructed the genome of long-extinct human relatives, showing we have more in common with Neandertals than previously thought

Svante Pääbo’s work on sequencing the DNA of Neandertals and Denisovans, which won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, revealed surprising interbreeding among human species

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

Fish fossils from Western Australia preserve the oldest 3-D hearts, livers, stomachs and intestines in a jawed vertebrate

The fossil-filled volcanic crater Foulden Maar was almost destroyed. A new book documents its ancient-ecosystem wonders

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

Geologic evidence for a freezing arctic suggests dinosaurs could have weathered an epoch-ending volcanic winter

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

The first known male appendage from trilobites has been found in a 508-million-year-old fossil

They scurried in the shadows of dinosaurs for millions of years until a killer space rock created a new world of evolutionary opportunity

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