Fossils News

December 21, 2024

Top Headlines

A Festive Flying Reptile Family Reunion 150 Million Years in the Making

Dec. 19, 2024 — A new study finds nearly 50 hidden relatives of Pterodactylus, the first pterosaur. Joined by its newly discovered relatives, Pterodactylus's 'family' now encompasses tiny flaplings, a host of teenagers, some mums and dads and even a few large old ...

Researchers Identify a Mysterious Fossil Seed to Reveal New Chapters in Climate History of Los Angeles

Dec. 19, 2024 — Scientists have successfully identified a previously unknown species to Southern California from fossilized seeds, revealing a drought-fueled dance between two species of juniper with lessons for the ...

Chart of Life Extended by Nearly 1.5 Billion Years

Dec. 19, 2024 — Fossilized skeletons and shells clearly show how evolution and extinction unfolded over the past half a billion years, but a new analysis extends the chart of life to nearly 2 billion years ago. The chart shows the relative ups and downs in species ...

Massive Volcanic Eruptions Did Not Cause the Extinction of Dinosaurs

Dec. 18, 2024 — While volcanism caused a temporary cold period, the effects had already worn off thousands of years before the meteorite, the ultimate cause of the dinosaur extinction event, ...

Latest Headlines

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Study Sheds Light on the Origin of the Genetic Code

Dec. 12, 2024 — Nearly all living organisms use the same genetic code, a complicated mechanism by which genetic information is translated into proteins, the building blocks of life. A new study suggests conventional ...

Unique Insights Into Lives of People Who Lived Over 5,600 Years Ago Near Kosenivka, Ukraine

Dec. 11, 2024 — A new study sheds light on the lives of people who lived over 5,600 years ago near Kosenivka, Ukraine. Researchers present the first detailed ...

A New Timeline for Neanderthal Interbreeding With Modern Humans

Dec. 12, 2024 — Neanderthal genes make up 1-2% of the genomes of non-Africans. Scientists analyzed the lengths of regions of Neanderthal DNA in 58 ancient Eurasian genomes of early modern humans and determined that ...

Oldest Modern Human Genomes Sequenced

Dec. 12, 2024 — Few genomes have been sequenced from early modern humans, who first arrived in Europe when the region was already inhabited by Neanderthals. An international team has now sequenced the oldest modern ...

Earliest Deep-Cave Ritual Compound in Southwest Asia Discovered

Dec. 9, 2024 — A cave in Galilee, Israel, has yielded evidence for ritualistic gathering 35,000 years ago, the earliest on the Asian ...

Insect Fossil Find 'Extremely Rare'

Dec. 2, 2024 — Newly discovered insect fossils are so small they can barely be seen by the human eye but have been preserved in an 'extraordinary' ...

A Fossil First: Scientists Find 1.5-Million-Year-Old Footprints of Two Different Species of Human Ancestors at Same Spot

Nov. 28, 2024 — More than a million years ago, on a hot savannah teeming with wildlife near the shore of what would someday become Lake Turkana in Kenya, two ...

Brains Grew Faster as Humans Evolved

Nov. 27, 2024 — Brain size increased gradually within each ancient human species rather than through sudden leaps between ...

World's Oldest Lizard Wins Fossil Fight

Nov. 26, 2024 — A storeroom specimen that changed the origins of modern lizards by millions of years has had its identity ...

Scientists Use Ancient DNA to Shed Light on Adaptation of Early Europeans

Nov. 19, 2024 — Leveraging a unique statistical analysis and applying it to ancient DNA extracted from human skeletal remains, a team of researchers has revealed new insights into how ancient Europeans adapted to ...

The Chilling Sound of the Aztec Death Whistle

Nov. 19, 2024 — The Aztec skull whistle produces a shrill, screaming sound. A study shows that these whistles have a disturbing effect on the human brain. The Aztecs may have deliberately used this effect in ...

Tiny Worm Makes for Big Evolutionary Discovery

Nov. 18, 2024 — The history of a major animal group, composed of millions of species of insects, arachnids, and nemotodes, has been elusive -- until now. A team has now identified the oldest known ecdysozoan in the ...

Earliest Evidence of Humans Using Fire to Shape the Landscape of Tasmania

Nov. 16, 2024 — Some of the first human beings to arrive in Tasmania, over 41,000 years ago, used fire to shape and manage the landscape, about 2,000 years earlier than previously ...

Egyptians Drank Hallucinogenic Cocktails in Ancient Rituals, Study Confirms

Nov. 15, 2024 — Scholars for the first time identified chemical signatures of the components of a liquid concoction contained in a Bes mug. A new technique helped identify a sample flavored with honey, sesame seeds, ...

Bird Brain from the Age of Dinosaurs Reveals Roots of Avian Intelligence

Nov. 13, 2024 — A 'one of a kind' fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate ...

New Insights Into the Denisovans: New Hominin Group That Interbred With Modern Day Humans

Nov. 8, 2024 — Scientists believe individuals of the most recently discovered 'hominin' group (the Denisovans) that interbred with modern day humans passed on some of their genes via multiple, distinct ...

Did the World's Best-Preserved Dinosaurs Really Die in 'Pompeii-Type' Events?

Nov. 4, 2024 — Extraordinarily well preserved fossils of feathered dinosaurs and other creatures got that way after being frozen in time by by volcanic eruptions, researchers have long suggested. Not so fast, says ...

Fossil of Huge Terror Bird Offers New Information About Wildlife in South America 12 Million Years Ago

Nov. 4, 2024 — Evolutionary biologists report they have analyzed a fossil of an extinct giant meat-eating bird -- which they say could be the largest known member of its kind -- providing new information about ...

Reconstructing Ancient Climate Provides Clues to Climate Change

Nov. 4, 2024 — Research helps reconstruct an ancient climate and challenges the timing of the Andes Mountains ...

Indigenous Cultural Burning Has Protected Australia's Landscape for Millennia, Study Finds

Nov. 1, 2024 — Ancient cultural burning practices carried out by Indigenous Australians limited fuel availability and prevented high intensity fires in southeastern Australia for thousands of years, according to ...

Buried Alive: Carbon Dioxide Release from Magma Deep Beneath Ancient Volcanoes Was a Hidden Driver of Earth's Past Climate

Oct. 30, 2024 — A team discovered that, contrary to present scientific understanding, ancient volcanoes continued to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from deep within the Earth long past their period of ...

Ancient DNA Brings to Life History of the Iconic Aurochs, Whose Tale Is Intertwined With Climate Change and Human Culture

Oct. 30, 2024 — Geneticists have deciphered the prehistory of aurochs -- the animals that were the focus of some of the most iconic early human art -- by analyzing 38 genomes harvested from bones dating across 50 ...

Sinuses Prevented Prehistoric Crocodile Relatives from Deep Diving

Oct. 30, 2024 — Paleobiologists have found that the sinuses of ocean dwelling relatives of modern-day crocodiles prevented them from evolving into deep divers like whales and ...

Fossil Hunters Strike Gold With New Species

Oct. 29, 2024 — Paleontologists have identified fossils of an ancient species of bug that spent the past 450 million years covered in fool's gold in central New York. The new species, Lomankus edgecombei, is a ...

How Mammals Got Their Stride

Oct. 25, 2024 — Researchers reveal new insights into the complex evolutionary history behind the distinctive upright posture of modern placental and marsupial mammals, showing the transition was surprisingly complex ...

'Well-Man' Thrown from Castle Identified from 800-Year-Old Norse Saga

Oct. 25, 2024 — A passage in the Norse Sverris Saga, the 800-year-old story of King Sverre Sigurdsson, describes a military raid that occurred in AD 1197, during which a body was thrown into a well at Sverresborg ...

Fossils Unveil How Southern Europe's Ecosystem Changed Through Glacial-Interglacial Stages

Oct. 23, 2024 — Fossils from more than 600,000 years ago reveal how Southern Europe's animal community shifted between warm and cold climate fluctuations, according to a new ...

'Paleo-Robots' to Help Scientists Understand How Fish Started to Walk on Land

Oct. 23, 2024 — The transition from water to land is one of the most significant events in the history of life on Earth. Now, a team of roboticists, palaeontologists and biologists is using robots to study how the ...

Paleontologists Discover Colorado 'Swamp Dweller' That Lived Alongside Dinosaurs

Oct. 23, 2024 — The new mammal lived in Colorado 70 to 75 million years ago -- a time when a vast inland sea covered large portions of the state, and animals like sharks, turtles and giant crocodiles ...

Symbiosis in Ancient Corals

Oct. 23, 2024 — A research team has used nitrogen isotope analysis to demonstrate that 385 million years old corals from the Eifel and Sauerland regions had symbionts. This finding represents the earliest evidence ...