For decades, paleontologists have held up uintatheres as a prime illustration of sexual dimorphism, or the tendency for males ...

Researchers may have uncovered the reason why some of Earth's earliest animals were commonly preserved as fossils—even though ...

The fossil record is biased. Because soft tissues like organs are very rarely preserved, paleontologists are left to piece together extinct life from the hard stuff (bones, shells, exoskeletons, ...

The animal kingdom may have started its journey on a much earlier Earth than scientists once thought. Long before ...

For the more than 242 million years that lizards and snakes appear in the fossil record, they show up mostly as pieces of lizard jaws and snake vertebrae. Exactly why these parts survive as fossils ...

Scientists are increasingly worried we may be witnessing the start of the "sixth mass extinction"—the first to be caused by human activities. Five earlier mass extinctions, caused by dramatic but ...

A roughly 2. 6-million-year-old jaw provides the first identified Paranthropus fossil from Ethiopia’s Afar region.

Hundreds of scientifically important fossil records from the Jurassic Coast have been made publicly available for the first time in a new digital catalogue. The Fossil Codes website features more than ...

"We analysed the fossil record and found that the quality of the record of four groups of dinosaur (clades) gets worse during the final 6 million years prior to the asteroid. The probability of ...

Ancient fossil beans about the size of modern limes, and among the largest seeds in the fossil record, may provide new insight into the evolution of today's diverse Southeast Asian and Australian ...