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Two men discovered an ancient bison skull while scavenging near downtown Kansas City, Missouri, in mid-January. Mike Ruth and Dave Jamerson were poking around the waterways of the Missouri River, looking for artifacts, fossils, cool stuff like that, when they found what they first thought might have been a piece of driftwood, according to KCTV5. As they lifted the piece from the silt, they realized they had “something really cool,” as Ruth told the outlet. “I immediately thought bison,” Jamerson commented. The fossil was covered in silt and zebra mussels as they unearthed it, but came out of the dirt...

Around 120 million years ago, four-winged dinosaurs roughly the size of crows called Microraptors stalked the ancient woodlands of what is now China.While researchers have studied several Microraptor specimens, there's still a lot we don't know about these feathered bird-like creatures – including what and how they ate.Now an incredibly rare fossil has revealed the preserved final meal of one individual: and unexpectedly, it was a mammal...The first Microraptor fossil was found in Liaoning, China, in 2000. There are three known species, which lived in the early Cretacious period, and the fossil in question belongs to Microraptor zhaoianus...The Microraptors were...

Lizard Skull Fossil Closeup One of the Thalassotitan skulls. (University of Bath) The discovery of incredible fossils of a giant marine lizard reveals how this ancient extinct beast would have ruled the sea 66 million years ago. The beast is a newly discovered species of mosasaur, giant marine reptiles that hunted the oceans during the Late Cretaceous. It's called Thalassotitan atrox, and wear on its teeth along with other remains found at its excavation site suggest that this intimidating animal was no gentle giant – but feasted on difficult prey such as sea turtles, plesiosaurs, and other mosasaurs. Other mosasaurs...

"Little Foot" one of several well-known fossils found at Sterkfontein caves in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind. The fossils of our earliest ancestors found in South Africa are a million years older than previously thought, meaning they walked the Earth around the same time as their East African relatives like the famous "Lucy", according to new research. The Sterkfontein caves at the Cradle of Humankind world heritage site southwest of Johannesburg have yielded more Australopithecus fossils than any other site in the world. Among them was "Mrs Ples", the most complete skull of an Australopithecus africanus found in South...

Scientists have finally rediscovered a lost fossil site in Brazil, after the researchers who originally discovered it 70 years ago were unable to retrace their steps to the remote location...The rediscovered site, which is known as Cerro Chato, is located near Brazil’s border with Uruguay in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Around 260 million years ago, towards the end of the Permian period (299 million to 251 million years ago) conditions at the site were ideal for trapping and preserving dead organisms. As a result, multiple rocky layers at Cerro Chato are chock-full of delicate fossils —...

Scientists have uncovered the remains of one of the largest pterosaurs on record, researchers announced in a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research. The fossils are from the largest-ever pterosaur found in South America, and one of the largest flying vertebrates in the world, according to researchers. The discovery of two separate animals was made in an outcrop in Argentina's Mendoza province and published in April. The Thanatosdrakon amaru is a new azhdarchid, a member of the pterosaur family of large, flying predators, predominantly from the Late Cretaceous Period. The name is a combination of Thanatos, the...

Spider fossil under UV light. (Olcott et al., Communications Earth and Environment, 2022) =================================================================== 21 APRIL 2022 A fossilized spider that glows under ultraviolet light has given away the secret of its exceptional 23-million-year-long existence. When researchers placed the fossil and others like it under a fluorescent microscope on a whim, they were surprised to notice the subtle outline of the arachnids suddenly pop against their background. "To our surprise they glowed, and so we got very interested in what the chemistry of these fossils was that made them glow," explains geologist Alison Olcott from the University of Kansas. Analyses...

The limb, complete with skin, is just one of a series of remarkable finds emerging from the Tanis fossil site in the US State of North Dakota. But it's not just their exquisite condition that's turning heads - it's what these ancient specimens purport to represent. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began. The BBC has spent three years filming at Tanis for a show to be broadcast on...

A long-necked dinosaur that roamed present-day Montana 150 million years ago likely suffered from a respiratory infection, according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, the first evidence of a respiratory infection in dinosaurs which experts believe could have caused flu-like symptoms including coughing and fever

The discovery by researchers led from the University of Toulouse–Jean Jaurès was made in the 'Grotte Mandrin', 1.5 miles south of Malataverne, in the Rhône Valley.Previously, the oldest proven examples of modern human settlements in Europe were dated back to 45,000–43,000 years ago — 10,000 years earlier.Furthermore, the Mandrin cave also provides the first clear example of a site that was alternately occupied by Neanderthals and modern humans (Homo sapiens).

Richard Leakey, the world-renowned paleoanthropologist-turned-conservationist, has died at 77. The death of the native Kenyan was announced late Sunday by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta. A cause of death was not given. Leakey, whose famous parents, Louis and Mary Leakey, made profound contributions to the understanding of human evolution through key fossil finds of early hominids, also made important discoveries of his own in the field. In 1981, he gained public notoriety as the presenter in a BBC television series called The Making of Mankind. By the late 1980s, however, he had shifted his focus, stepping in as head of the...

The largest-ever fossil of a giant millipede—as big as a car—has been found on a beach in the north of England. The fossil—the remains of a creature called Arthropleura—dates from the Carboniferous Period, about 326 million years ago, over 100 million years before the Age of Dinosaurs. The fossil reveals that Arthropleura was the largest-known invertebrate animal of all time, larger than the ancient sea scorpions that were the previous record holders. The specimen, found on a Northumberland beach about 40 miles north of Newcastle, is made up of multiple articulated exoskeleton segments, broadly similar in form to modern millipedes....

Mars rover Perseverance lists, among its mission objectives, a first for red planet exploration. The robotic explorer has been tasked with searching for signs of ancient microbial life on the dusty, dry planet – tiny microfossils that would be evidence that Mars was once habitable. That would indeed be an astounding, incredible discovery – but the new paper urges caution in interpreting what we find, in both this and future sources. According to astrobiologist Sean McMahon of the University of Edinburgh and geobiologist Julie Cosmidis of the University of Oxford in the UK, scientists will have to keep an eye...

About 23,000 years ago, a group of children and teenagers left footprints along Lake Otero in what is now southern New Mexico – perhaps they were fetching water for adults hunting a mammoth or the massive ground sloth that roamed the area in those days. This week, a team of researchers from White Sands National Park, the National Parks Service and others published an article in the journal Science, which concludes that those children’s footprints were the oldest known human tracks ever found in North America. Imprints of the tiny toes were found along outcrops of the since-dried-up lake, which...

Palaeontologist Tim Ewin is standing in a quarry, recalling the calamity that's written in the rocks under his mud-caked boots.... ...The misfortune that struck this place 167 million years ago has delivered to him an extraordinary collection of fossil animals in what is unquestionably one of the most important Jurassic dig sites ever discovered in the UK.... ...The quantities involved are astonishing. Not hundreds, not thousands, but perhaps tens of thousands of these animals that scientists collectively call "the echinoderms". It's a great name, derived from the Greek for "hedgehog", or "spiny", "skin". What is a sea urchin, if not...

Fossils from two giant rhinos dating back about 22 million years have been unearthed in China, according to a study published Thursday. They are among the latest relics of the gigantic animal, which was discovered amid great fanfare early last century. Much larger than modern rhinos, giant rhinos often stood more than 20 feet tall at the shoulder and weighed more than 20 tons, making them bigger than mammoths and the largest land mammal that ever lived.One fossil consists of a skull, jawbone and teeth, and the atlas vertebra — where the head connects to the spine — while the...

One of the alleged greatest transformations in vertebrate evolution is said to be the emergence of creatures that traded fins for feet and transitioned from water to land.1-3 In other words, fish somehow evolved the numerous anatomical and physiological systems found in four-legged amphibians and various land-based reptiles. Despite evolutionary propaganda surrounding unusual fish-like creatures discovered in the fossil record, the necessary evidence of such a monumental evolutionary leap is profoundly lacking.In 2012, Jennifer Clack, one of the most famous vertebrate paleontologists of the modern era, concluded, “The question of where tetrapods evolved is even more difficult to answer than...

The modern theory of evolution has its roots in Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species, in which he proposed the fundamental conjecture that “all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form.”1 In the extrapolation of this concept, millions of progressive life forms should have developed in an evolutionary continuum along all the different branches of life leading up to the huge diversity of plants and animals that are alive today. Many current biology textbooks depict this universal common ancestry as a “tree of life” similar to the...

When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question. Fossils and DNA suggest people looking like us, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, archaeology—tools, artifacts, cave art—suggest that complex technology and cultures, “behavioral modernity,” evolved more recently: 50,000 to 65,000 years ago. Some scientists interpret this as suggesting the earliest Homo sapiens weren’t entirely modern. Yet the different data tracks different things. Skulls and genes tell us about brains, artifacts about culture. Our brains probably became modern before our cultures.Key physical and cultural milestones in...

NASA currently expects to land the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars on February 18, 2021. Once the rover is on the surface and working, it will begin to search for traces of microscopic life that could be billions of years old. The rover is fitted with an instrument called PIXL, which is a lunchbox-sized device at the end of the seven-foot-long robotic arm fitted to the rover. . PIXL uses more than an x-ray beam alone, it also has a hexapod, which is a device featuring six mechanical legs connected to the robotic arm guided by...