History News

Long before whales, the oceans of Earth were roamed by a very different kind of air-breathing leviathan. Snaggle-toothed ichthyosaurs larger than school buses swam at the top of the Triassic Period ocean food chain

Researchers at the University of Arkansas are studying a new field of fossilized dinosaur tracks, including one set that appears to be from a large three-toed predator, the university said Wednesday

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine with help from an amateur fossil hunter in College Park, Md., have described the fossil of an armored dinosaur hatchling. It is the youngest nodosaur ever discovered

A new species of raptor dinosaur discovered in southern Utah that sheds new light on this and several other long-standing questions in paleontology, including how dinosaurs evolved on the "lost continent" of Laramidia (western North America)

A new study puts an end to the longstanding debate about how archaic birds went extinct, suggesting they were virtually wiped out by the same meteorite impact that put an end to dinosaurs 65 million years ago

Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission indicate the family of asteroids some believed was responsible for the demise of the dinosaurs is not likely the culprit, keeping open the case on one of Earth's greatest mysterie

Resin turned to resilient amber has preserved some 80 million-year-old protofeathers, possibly from non-avian dinosaurs, as well as plumage that is very similar to modern birds, including those that can swim under water

Floating rafts of volcanic pumice could have played a significant role in the origins of life on Earth, scientists from Oxford University and the University of Western Australia have suggested.

A remarkably well-preserved fossil discovered in northeast China provides new information about the earliest ancestors of most of today's mammal species -- the placental mammals. According to a paper published August 25 in the journal Nature, this fossil

Earth's oldest fossils have been found in Australia by a team from the University of Western Australia and Oxford University. The microscopic fossils show convincing evidence for cells and bacteria living in an oxygen-free world over 3.4 billion years ago