Sharks are in the ocean and piranhas are in freshwater … right? Well, it turns out that 150 million years ago, the sea was also home to a piranha-like fish known as Piranhamesodon pinnatomus. The recently-classified creature is officially the earliest known flesh-eating ray-finned fish.
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A few years ago, researchers studying stromatolites in Greenland dated them to 3.7 billion years old, making them the oldest evidence of life on Earth. However, a new study has now taken another look at the rocks and found that they probably weren’t biological in origin.
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Ledumahadi mafube was the world's largest land animal when it existed almost 200 million years ago. Despite this fact, none of the dinosaur's fossilized remains were discovered until relatively recently, and it has only now been scientifically classified.
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In the past, scientists have discovered the fossilized remains of prehistoric turtles that had a partial shell, but that lacked the toothless beak of modern turtles. Recently, however, a fossil turtle was found that had no shell, but that DID have a beak.
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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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