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In 1973, a teacher named Joan Hodgins took her students on a hike near Whitehorse in Canada's Yukon Territory. In the process, she made history for this chilly region. While exploring the tailings left behind by a now-defunct copper mine, Hodgins and her students stumbled across a few fragments of fossils -- bits and pieces of what seemed to be teeth alongside pieces of bone. The ancient fragments of teeth were so small and in such bad shape that "most paleontologists may not have picked them up," said Jaelyn Eberle, a curator of fossil vertebrates at the University of Colorado...

The teeth, found in Germany, provoked one observer to suggest human history may need to be rewritten. Some experts, however, remain very skeptical. In a paper shared at the social networking site ResearchGate, Herbert Lutz and his team say they discovered “a new great ape with startling resemblances to African members of the hominin tribe.” The "plausible age” of the fossils — an upper left canine tooth and an upper right first molar — is 9.7 million years, they say. If confirmed, that would make the teeth around 6 million years older than fossils for the early-human, African ancestor Australopithecus...

A 9.7-million-year-old discovery has left a team of German scientists scratching their heads. The teeth seem to belong to a species only known to have appeared in Africa several million years later. A team of German archaeologists discovered a puzzling set of teeth in the former riverbed of the Rhine, the Museum of Natural History in Mainz announced on Wednesday. The teeth don't appear to belong to any species discovered in Europe or Asia. They most closely resemble those belonging to the early hominin skeletons of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), famously discovered in Ethiopia. But these new...

More than three-quarters of species on Earth died out. But life came back, and land mammals began to expand from being small creatures into the wide array of forms we see today—including us. So the new find taps into "the origin of the modern world," said Tyler Lyson, an author of a paper reporting the fossil finds Thursday in the journal Science. The fossils were recovered from an area of steep bluffs covering about 10 square miles (17 square kilometers) near Colorado Springs, starting three years ago. Scientists have previously found little evidence about what happened in the aftermath of...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A revelatory cache of fossils dug up in central Colorado details as never before the rise of mammals from the post-apocalyptic landscape after an asteroid smacked Earth 66 million years ago and annihilated three-quarters of all species including the dinosaurs. The fossils, described by scientists on Thursday, date from the first million years after the calamity and show that the surviving terrestrial mammalian and plant lineages rebounded with aplomb. Mammals, after 150 million years of subservience, attained dominance. Plant life diversified impressively. With dinosaurs no longer eating them, mammals made quick evolutionary strides, assuming new forms and...

Israeli team used DNA to design first Denosivan replica Portrait of a female Denisovan teen. (photo credit: MAAYAN HAREL) ================================================================ Meet “Denise,” the first reconstructed anatomical profile of what, until now, were considered the mysterious Denisovans, a group of archaic humans. She was revealed on Thursday by researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The team who managed to recreate her profile say that long-term, their research shows possible strategies that could be taken for forensic applications. Denisovans lived in Siberia and Eastern Asia before going extinct approximately 50,000 years ago, said Hebrew University researcher Prof. Liran Carmel, who led...

About 10 years ago, Peter Hews stumbled across some bones sticking out of a cliff along the Oldman River in southeastern Alberta, Canada. Now, scientists describe in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on June 4 that those bones belonged to a nearly intact skull of a very unusual horned dinosaur—a close relative of the familiar Triceratops that had been unknown to science until now. "The specimen comes from a geographic region of Alberta where we have not found horned dinosaurs before, so from the onset we knew it was important," says Dr. Caleb Brown of the Royal Tyrrell Museum...

CLEVELAND, February 24, 2007 – A scientist at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History has announced the discovery of a new horned dinosaur, named Albertaceratops nesmoi, approximately 20 feet long and weighing nearly one half ton, or the weight of a pickup truck. The newly identified plant-eating dinosaur lived nearly 78 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period in what is now southernmost Alberta, Canada. Its identification marks the discovery of a new genus and species and sheds exciting new light on the evolutionary history of the Ceratopsidae dinosaur family. Only one other horned dinosaur has been discovered in...

Scientists hail it as perhaps the best-preserved dinosaur specimen ever uncovered. You can’t even see its bones. That’s because, 110 million years later, those bones remain covered by the creature’s intact skin and armor.

Researchers discovered bits of many marine organisms in the coprolites dropped by Jurassic pterosaurs. The findings suggest the flying reptiles used a filter feeding technique similar to modern flamingos. Photo by Qvarnström et al./PeerJ =============================================================== Aug. 26 (UPI) -- New analysis of ancient coprolites -- fossilized droppings -- suggest Late Jurassic pterosaurs used a filter-feeding technique similar to modern flamingos. Scientists studied dozens of droppings found surrounding the 150-million-year-old footprints of pterosaurs in Poland's fossil-rich Wierzbica Quarry. Coprolites can offer paleontologists valued information about the diets of ancient species, but it's often difficult to determine which species produced the droppings....

Scientists have found that increasing oxygen levels are linked to the rise of North American dinosaurs around 215 M years ago. A new technique for measuring oxygen levels in ancient rocks shows that oxygen levels in North American rocks leapt by nearly a third in just a couple of million years, possibly setting the scene for a dinosaur expansion into the tropics of North America and elsewhere... The US-based scientists have developed a new technique for releasing tiny amounts of gas trapped inside ancient carbonate minerals. The gases are then channelled directly into a mass spectrometer, which measures their composition....

All birds evolved from feathered theropods — the two-legged dinosaurs like T. rex — beginning about 150 million years ago, and developed into many lineages in the Cretaceous period, between 146 and 65 million years ago. But after the cataclysm that wiped out most of the dinosaurs, only one group of birds remained: the ancestors of the birds we see today.Why did only one family survive the mass extinction? The newly-discovered fossil from one of those extinct bird groups, enantiornithines, deepens that mystery. ..." Mirarce eatoni’s breast bone or sternum, where flight muscles attach, is more deeply keeled than other...

Researchers have captured the mysterious bluntnose sixgill shark on film, a creature [species] that has been on Earth since before the dinosaurs. Described as "perfectly efficient" by the team from OceanX and Florida State University, the bluntnose sixgill shark is largely still an unknown to researchers, despite having been on the planet for nearly 200 million years. Occasionally, they come to the shallow waters, rising from depths as far as 8,200 feet, according to Science Alert, where they arrive under the blanket of the night sky to feed. In capturing the mysterious bluntnose sixgill on film in the Bahamas, the...

A giant cannibalistic parrot that stood more than three feet tall and lived in New Zealand 19 million years ago has been dubbed 'squawkzilla'. Scientists reckon the animal, which is officially known as Heracles inexpectatus, feasted on other parrots to nourish its massive frame. The tree-dwelling creature is believed to have used its enormous beak to feed on the flesh of its own species. It is thought to be the largest parrot ever and rivals the famed dodo in its bulk, and towers above the current flightless inhabitants of New Zealand, the kakapo.

Cambroraster falcatus was an ancient, primitive arthropod that dominated the ocean approximately 506 million years ago during the Cambrian period. The creature's name was inspired, in part, by Star Wars' Millennium Falcon due to its similar resemblance of the fictional spacecraft (sort of). C. falcatus, which was roughly the size of a human hand when fully grown though this fossil was nearly a foot long, also bore a striking resemblance to the modern horseshoe crab, per a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. The anatomy of the apex predator featured a carapace that covered its...

(Video at source)A group of international researchers say they have uncovered possible evidence of a warmer climate in Alaska — dating back to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Dr. Tony Fiorillo of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, Texas, and his team are fresh back from a three-week, remote expedition to Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve. During that time, Fiorillo says the researchers discovered what appeared to be a crayfish burrow. How do crayfish fit in with dinosaurs? We wondered that too. "They lived with the dinosaurs," Fiorillo explained. "As you can imagine, in Anchorage, there aren't...

This is one bone you don't want to pick with. Paleontologists have unearthed a 140-million-year-old dinosaur bone, 6.5 feet in length, weighing 1,100 pounds in France. The thigh bone was discovered in Charente, an area that dates back 140 million years and has been a treasure trove for archaeologists in the past. “This is a major discovery,” Ronan Allain, a paleontologist at the National History Museum of Paris said in an interview with Reuters. “I was especially amazed by the state of preservation of that femur.” “These are animals that probably weighed 40 to 50 tons," Allain added. More than...

Researchers have found the fossilized remains of a new species of lizard inside the stomach of a small flying dinosaur known as a microraptor. Known as Indrasaurus wangi (after an ancient Hindu legend), the lizard was found almost entirely complete, SWNS reports. The lizard was swallowed whole, head first, by the microraptor, a crucial clue that provides new information into the eating habit of the winged dinosaur. "The new lizard had teeth unlike any other previously known from the Jehol Biota, thus expanding the diversity of this clade and possibly suggesting a unique diet for this new species," according to...

Hunting for shiny, rainbow-coloured gemstones, miners found a different kind of treasure — a wonderfully preserved fossil skeleton of an ancient sea monster. The marine reptile lived 70 million years ago — at the same time as the dinosaurs — and was unearthed from a part of Alberta, Canada, that used to be underwater. The skeleton of the fearsome predator has, rarely, been very well preserved, with only its flippers missing.

Inside a Crimean cave was a gigantic ancient mystery just waiting to be uncovered: a bird so large that it weighed nearly as much as an adult polar bear. Giant birds once roamed Madagascar, New Zealand and Australia. The latest fossil find, an intriguing fossilized femur, was recently found in Taurida Cave on the northern coast of the Black Sea. It was discovered along with other fossils, including bison bones, that helped researchers date the now-extinct giant bird to between 1.5 million and 2 million years ago. When the first early human ancestors arrived in Europe, they might have encountered...