fossil

Just in time for Halloween, researchers have announced the discovery of a new, real-world “monster” — what they are calling a “unicorn” fly that lived about 100 million years ago and is being described as a new family, genus and species of fly never before observed.
A single, incredibly well-preserved specimen of the tiny but scary-looking [...]

Microscopic analysis of scratches on dinosaur teeth has helped scientists unravel an ancient riddle of what a major group of dinosaurs ate — and exactly how they did it!
Now for the first time, a study led by the University of Leicester, has found evidence that the duck-billed dinosaurs — the Hadrosaurs — in fact had [...]

A previously unknown giant volcanic eruption that led to global mass extinction 260 million years ago has been uncovered by scientists at the University of Leeds.
The eruption in the Emeishan province of south-west China unleashed around half a million cubic kilometres of lava, covering an area 5 times the size of Wales, and wiping out [...]

Ancient footprints found at Rutgers’ Koobi Fora Field School show that some of the earliest humans walked like us and did so on anatomically modern feet 1.5 million years ago.
Published as the cover story in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Science, this anatomical interpretation is the conclusion of Rutgers Professor John W.K. Harris [...]

National Science Foundation-funded scientists working in an ice-free region of Antarctica have discovered the last traces of tundra — in the form of fossilized plants and insects — on the interior of the southernmost continent before temperatures began a relentless drop millions of years ago.
An abrupt and dramatic climate cooling of 8 degrees Celsius, over [...]

It took a decade of painstaking study, the cooperation of hundreds of researchers, and a database of more than 200,000 fossil records, but John Alroy thinks he’s disproved much of the conventional wisdom about the diversity of marine fossils and extinction rates.
Alroy, a researcher with the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at [...]

Geologists at the University of Leicester have solved a puzzle found in rocks half a billion years old.
Some of the most important fossil beds in the world are the Burgess Shales in the Canadian Rockies. Once an ancient sea bed, they were formed shortly after life suddenly became more complex and diverse - the so-called [...]

The gigantic fossil claw of an 390 million-year-old sea scorpion, recently found in Germany, shows that ancient arthropods — spiders, insects, crabs and the like — were surprisingly larger than their modern-day counterparts.
"Imagine an eight-foot-long scorpion," said O. Erik Tetlie, postdoctoral associate in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale, and an author of [...]