Tag Archives: Fossils

With serpentine necks, flippers and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, plesiosaurs have captured imaginations since paleontologists uncovered the first specimen more than two centuries ago. Their skeletal anatomy is well documented, but their external appearance has largely remained a mystery. Now researchers have conducted the first detailed analysis of plesiosaur soft tissue, offering a more complete look at what …

It’s taken decades, but scientists may have finally found Earth’s first fowl. It started in 1993 on Vega Island, a frigid, windswept rock off the Antarctic Peninsula. A mostly headless skeleton of a loon-size diving bird emerged from rocks that, at 68 million years old, predated the dinosaur extinction. The species, which scientists named Vegavis iaai, presented a puzzle: What …

In 1786, a British judge named William Jones noticed striking similarities between certain words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Latin, whose speakers were separated by thousands of miles. The languages must have “sprung from some common source,” he wrote. Later generations of linguists determined that Sanskrit and Latin belong to a huge family of so-called Indo-European languages. So do …

More than three million years after her death, the early human ancestor known as Lucy is still divulging her secrets. In 2016, an autopsy indicated that the female Australopithecus afarensis, whose partial remains were found in Ethiopia in 1974 and is considered the most complete hominid fossil found to date, died from a fall out of a tree. Seven years …

Around 76 million years ago, something took a bite out of a young pterosaur. Pterosaurs were large, flying reptiles that roamed our planet’s skies when dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Some species were giants. But even their large size didn’t keep them off the menu. Paleontologists have discovered a tooth mark in a neck vertebra of a pterosaur that died in …

Let’s be candid here. Vomit is something you want to get rid of. You don’t want it hanging around for a day, or an hour, or even a few minutes. And certainly not for 66 million years. And yet, scientists say, vomit that old has been found in the Cliffs of Stevns, a white chalk cliff and UNESCO World Heritage …

Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains …

Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home. Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains …

Mark Sutton, an Imperial College London paleontologist, is not a punk. “I’m more of a folk and country person,” he said. But when Dr. Sutton pieced together 3-D renderings of a tiny fossil mollusk, he was struck by the spikes that covered its wormlike body. “This is like a classic punk hairstyle, the way it’s sticking up,” he thought. He …