Sauropods – the giant, long-necked dinosaurs like Brachiosaurus – were the largest land animals to ever walk the Earth. Now, researchers have studied sauropod feet and found that the animals may have had an unexpected gait – tiptoeing around like they were wearing high heels.
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It’s not known exactly when humans and Neanderthals split off from their last common ancestor, but the estimated window is very wide, between 300,000 and 800,000 years ago. Now a new study has found evidence that this split took place towards the earlier end of that range, or even longer ago still.
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Within a relatively short period of time, life burst forth into an incredible diversity of forms, in an event that has since come to be known as the Cambrian explosion. Now, an international team of scientists has found clues to what may have caused that – spikes in oxygen levels.
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Amber can be a veritable treasure trove of ancient animals and insects, but it most commonly captures creatures that lived in forests – understandable, given the stuff starts life as tree sap. But now researchers have found a piece of amber bearing a strange mix of land and sea-dwelling creatures.
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Evolution helps life adapt to new environments – and now scientists have uncovered a rare occasion where it got a second chance. About 136,000 years ago, a flightless bird on an island in the Indian Ocean was wiped out, only to re-evolve itself back into existence tens of thousands of years later.
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Like the Wright Brothers, evolution didn’t get flight exactly right the first time. It takes experimentation to find the best design, and now palaeontologists have found one of nature’s quirky side projects – a strange dinosaur that was covered in feathers but had leathery bat-like wings.
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In 1998, a 16-year-old boy with a passion for paleontology unearthed a near-complete skeleton of one of Tyrannosaurus rex's cousins. It was a defining moment in the boy's life, but at the time nobody knew what it was. Now, 21 years later, the dinosaur he found finally has a name.
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Scientist now have to reevaluate what they know – or thought they knew – about the evolution of millipedes due to a tiny, 8.2-mm member of the order Callipodida who got its many feet stuck in some tree resin, which turned up in Myanmar, 99 million years later, as a golden lump of amber.
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A fossilized jawbone discovered on the Tibetan Plateau has been found to belong to a Denisovan, an enigmatic early human species closely related to Neanderthals. Its age suggests that Denisovans were the first hominins to occupy the area, long before the arrival of modern humans.
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After sitting in a drawer in a Kenyan museum for more than 40 years, a set of fossilized bones has introduced the world to a long-lost mega-carnivore from 22 million years ago. Bigger than a polar bear and possessing enormous canine teeth, meet Simbakubwa Kutokaafrika.
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