Scientists have found the earliest animal footprints ever discovered. The tracks and burrows, dating back half a billion years to the Ediacaran Period, were made by some of the earliest bilaterian animals, and reveal that more complex lifeforms arose earlier than previously thought.
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Lizards and snakes belong to a family of animals called squamates, and today there are almost 10,000 different species slithering around the world’s deserts, backyards, forests and mountains. Scientists have now uncovered the mother of them all.
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Although Mars appears to be an arid, lifeless place now, about four billion years ago its surface was covered with bodies of water – which may have supported microscopic life. A new study has determined what type of rocks may be most likely to contain the fossilized remains of such microbes.
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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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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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Cloudina was a tiny sea creature that existed about 545 million years ago, and many scientists believe that it played a major role in building the first reefs. Princeton geoscientists Adam Maloof and Akshay Mehra, however, think otherwise – and they do so because of a unique rock-grinding machine.
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According to the fossil record, plants migrated from the sea onto land about 420 million years ago, but that story is patchy at best. New research has wound back the evolutionary clock to determine that plants likely invaded dry land much earlier, about 500 million years ago.
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Scientists have discovered a brand new species of spider, with a feature that’s not normally seen in the creatures – a tail. If that’s making your skin crawl, take solace in the fact that the new arachnid, dubbed Chimerarachne, lived 100 million years ago and its remains were found trapped in amber.
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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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