If you feel like you’ve had some drawn-out breakups, think of the supercontinent of Pangaea, which took tens of millions of years to split up. Now a unique fossil skull might readjust the timeline, with a strange creature turning up on a different continent to its previously-discovered relatives.
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Scientists have pieced together what they think is the first bird beak ever to have evolved. It belongs to Ichthyornis dispar, which lived in North America nearly 100 million years ago. It's thought that its beak evolved as a surrogate hand to compensate for its forelimbs having evolved into wings.
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Dinosaurs are famous for their size, but the largest known animal to have ever existed is still with us today: the blue whale. Now a new study reports the discovery of a huge fossilized jawbone belonging to an unknown species of ichthyosaur that may have measured up to 26 m (85 ft) long.
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The dinosaur Archaeopteryx is widely regarded as one of the earliest ancestors of modern birds, but the question of whether or not it could actively fly has been debated for decades. Now, scientists have taken X-ray scans of fossil specimens, and concluded that the answer is yes – sort of.
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A sandstone slab covered in fossilized footprints has been excavated from the grounds of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. It contains 70 tracks from at least eight different species, including rarely-seen interactions between both dinosaurs and mammals.
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Paleontologists have discovered a new species in the Sahara Desert. Mansourasaurus shahinae, a school-bus-sized sauropod that plodded around Africa about 80 million years ago, which is helping scientists piece together the geology and evolutionary situation of the Late Cretaceous.
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Displaying eye-catching colors to catch the attention of a mate is common in nature. Scientists are claiming to have traced this all the way back to an ancient bird-like dinosaur, which they say used a colorful ring of neck feathers to woo potential suitors 160 million years ago.
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Scientists have long suspected that ticks feasted on the blood of dinosaurs. Preserved in a 99 million-year-old chunk of amber lies a hard tick grasping the feather of a dinosaur, suggesting that the parasitic insects did indeed harbor a penchant for prehistoric plasma.
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The pre-historic world was full of strange creatures. Now, palaeontologists have uncovered a bizarre new species of dinosaur that seems to blend together a swan, a penguin, a crocodile and a Velociraptor.
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Reconstructing dinosaurs from bones takes imagination. Based on the study of exceptionally-preserved feathers from Anchiornis, a bird-like dinosaur that seems to be a “rough draft” of avian flight, a new image may just be the most accurate depiction of any dinosaur to date.
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