Fossils

Many of us have had a tooth pulled in the dentist's chair, and even with anesthetic, it's not pleasant. So spare a thought for the people who, for millennia, chose to have good teeth yanked out with no painkillers – all in the name of beauty (mainly).

A surprise discovery in the Australian outback has delivered exciting insight into the origins of complex animal life. The animal fossil, dating back half a billion years, shows when bilateral symmetry emerged – a hallmark of most life on Earth now.

Bizarre clumps of organic matter found buried alongside Bronze Age mummies in China have now been identified as cheese. New DNA analysis has finally solved a long-standing mystery, and it makes it the oldest cheese ever found, dating back 3,600 years.

The fossil of an extremely unlucky dugong has been uncovered. The old sea cow had a pretty bad day about 20 million years ago when it was eaten by both a crocodile and a shark.

Scientists have found evidence that an isolated pocket of complex life evolved 2 billion years ago – only to go extinct and take another 1.5 billion years to return to that level. The controversial find could rewrite our understanding of life on Earth.

The discovery of a quartet of fossilized snakes, a never-before-seen species of boa that lived 38 million years ago, has provided scientists with a rare insight into reptilian social behavior and provided clues about the evolution of its modern ancestors.

How do we separate the movie myths of Tyrannosaurus rex from the actual animal? The Victoria the T-rex exhibition sets the record straight with recent discoveries about what T-rex looked and sounded like, how it sensed the world, and how it hunted.

Well-preserved bones of a two-tonne glyptodont revealed cut marks indicative of stone tools, suggesting that human hunter-gatherers had settled in the Americas around 21,000 years ago – some 5,000 years before people were thought to have arrived.

Long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth, another giant predator claimed the top spot in its environment. Meet Gaiasia, a huge salamander-like creature that stalked the Permian swamps.

Scientists have just revealed their findings on what are being described as the most pristine trilobite fossils ever found. The fossils, which show both hard exterior features and soft inner tissues, shed new light on the fascinating creatures.

Geese have a reputation for being aggressive birds, so imagine one that’s more than 6.6 ft tall and weighs about 507 lb. That’s Genyornis newtoni, an Ice Age “thunder bird” from Australia, for which scientists have now found the first complete skull.

Scientists have discovered the oldest known skin fossils, dating back long before the dinosaurs. The samples, found in a cave in Oklahoma, USA, show that reptile scales haven’t changed much in the last 286 million years.