The further back in time you go, the patchier our understanding of life on Earth gets. Now, British scientists have used a different method known as a molecular clock to plot out a rough timeline of all life on Earth, tracing the first organisms back to about 4.5 billion years ago.
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One of the most unusual examples of fossil footprints has been uncovered in Alaska, with hadrosaur and therizionosaur tracks found side-by-side in what may have been the “dinosaur superhighway” connecting Asia to North America.
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Paleontologists have long wondered about the skeletons of a strange, ancient fish family called heterostracan. But now UK scientists say they’ve cracked it, declaring the 400 million-year-old fossils to be the oldest examples of bone ever found.
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Fossils are certainly fascinating, but the darn things do take rather a long time to form. What if you want to fossilize something as fast as possible? Well, scientists have developed a method of doing so within about 24 hours – and it could lead to big advances in the field of paleontology.
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Back in 1998, scientists from the University of Kansas unearthed a gigantic fossilized dinosaur foot in the Black Hills of Wyoming. Nicknamed "Bigfoot" at the time, it's now been officially certified as the largest dinosaur foot ever found.
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We've all heard about ancient insects getting preserved in amber (fossilized tree resin), with similarly-preserved items including dinosaur feathers, mammalian red blood cells and a bizarre spider. Now, for the first time, scientists have found an amber-encased prehistoric snake.
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Scientists have uncovered what they’re calling the oldest colors on Earth. Dating back more than a billion years, the bright pink pigments are the remains of some of the earliest microscopic organisms that once inhabited an ancient ocean, and their discovery helps fill a gap in the fossil record.
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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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