Fossils

The Mars 2020 rover will be touching down in Jezero Crater and now there’s more evidence this was a good choice. Two new studies have found that the landing site is rich in minerals that could preserve fossils of ancient microbes and other lifeforms.

The skeletal remains of some 14 woolly mammoths have been discovered in Mexico. More than 800 mammoth bones were distributed in two round pits – apparently traps used to house the mammoths. The remains were found north of Mexico City.

Fossil is almost single-handedly keeping the Wear OS flag flying in the smartwatch market, and the Gen 5 wearables are the best Fossil smartwatches yet. We strapped one to our wrist to see what it has to offer.

Found preserved in 30-million-year-old amber, the "mold pig" is so different from anything else that it’s been placed in a new genus all of its own.

Scientists have found some of the earliest direct evidence of life, in the form of organic remains in 3.5-billion-year-old stromatolites in Australia.

A recent analysis of previously-unearthed pterosaur bones reveals that they belonged to a new genus and species.

An almost-complete skull of Australopithecus anamensis allowed scientists to realistically recreate its face for the first time.

Palaeontologists in New Zealand have now uncovered the remains of Heracles inexpectatus, an extinct giant parrot that would have stood hip-high to most people and packed a beak powerful enough to crack open pretty much whatever it wanted to.

​Half a billion years ago, in the Cambrian Period, most animals were smaller than a person's little finger. That makes the recent discovery of a marine predator from that time all the more exciting, as the sucker grew up to one foot (30 cm) long.

Although they may not be as well-known as dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus, the duck-billed hadrosaurs were the most common plant-eating dinosaurs at the end of the Mesozoic Era. Now, a newly-classified member of the group appears to be a common ancestor to the various types that came later.

Fossilized human skulls found in a cave in Greece may force a rewrite of the human migration timeline yet again. Archaeologists have dated one of the skulls to about 210,000 years old – roughly 150,000 years older than the previous record-holder for earliest modern human remains in Europe.

The now-extinct megalodon was the largest predatory shark to ever live, while the great white is currently the largest of the predatory sharks. It now turns out that both fish likely descended from a small, flat shark that skulked along the seabed.