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You may think your dog has an irrational hatred of cats, but their instinct to chase felines out of their territory might be more reasonable than you think. Fossils have revealed the two species have a rocky past after the introduction of cats to the Americas had a devastating effect on the continent's species of wild dogs. In fact, it is thought that competition from cats caused up to 40 species of dog to become extinct in the region millions of years ago.

Sometime about 220 million years ago, a meandering stream flowed here and plants grew along its banks. Something, as yet unknown, caused sediment to flood the area rapidly, which helped preserve the plants. Gulbranson splits open a grey slab of siltstone in the quarry to reveal amazingly well-preserved Triassic plant fossils, as if the leaves and stems had been freshly pressed into the rock only yesterday. "It's a mixture of plants that don't exist anymore," he says, "but we have some plants in these fossil ecosystems that we might know today, like ginkgo." On the one end are fossils from...

Erik Gulbranson, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, trudges up a steep ridge overlooking his field camp of mountain tents and pyramid-shaped Scott tents in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. A brief hike nearly to the top of a shorter ridge ends at the quarry, where picks and hammers have chopped out a ledge of sorts in the slate-grey hillside. Sometime about 220 million years ago, a meandering stream flowed here and plants grew along its banks. Something, as yet unknown, caused sediment to flood the area rapidly, which helped preserve the plants. Gulbranson splits open a grey slab...

Around 5,000 years ago, the island of Madagascar would have resembled a Sci-Fi novel. Strange, prickly forests, gorilla-sized lemurs, pygmy hippopotamuses, horned crocodile and elephant birds whose eggs were 180 times the size of what you'd find in your fridge today, all called the African island home -- that was until the humans arrived.

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...

Scientists have discovered that the extinct megalodon shark was warm-blooded, as indicated by the isotopes in its tooth enamel. Their research suggests that the megalodon could maintain a body temperature about 13 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding water, a significant difference compared to other contemporary sharks. A killer, yes. But analysis of tooth minerals reveals how the warm-blooded predator maintained its body temperature. Researchers have determined that the extinct megalodon shark was warm-blooded, able to maintain its body temperature higher than the surrounding water. However, the energy needed for this temperature regulation might have contributed to the megalodon’s extinction...

Ancestors such as Eocene Hyracotherium exhibited foot structures resembling those of present-day tapirs, featuring four toes at the front and three at the back. Each toe was equipped with its own hoof and supported by an underlying foot pad.In contrast, contemporary equids such as horses, asses, and zebras possess a solitary toe, which is a remnant of the original third toe on each foot. This lone toe is protected by a sturdy keratinous hoof, while the underside of the hoof features a triangular frog that functions as a shock absorber.To unravel the mystery behind the lost digits, a team of...

Recreating the musculature of the leg and pelvis, the imagery supports the supposition that this part-time tree-dwelling hominin walked completely erect, like humans, but more than three million years earlier.Starting with human MRI and CT scans to map muscle pathways, Wiseman next focused on virtual reconstructions of Lucy's bones and joints, and then married up cues from muscle "scarring" on the bones.The resulting model shows how Lucy was capable of upright, erect locomotion but also possessed powerful leg muscles that facilitated her species' half-land, half-arboreal lifestyle. Researchers believe the extra muscle power in the legs – 74% of the total...

New evidence suggests that the famous fossilised human ancestor dubbed "Lucy" by scientists died falling from a great height - probably out of a tree. CT scans have shown injuries to her bones similar to those suffered by modern humans in similar falls. The 3.2 million-year-old hominin was found on a treed flood plain, making a branch her most likely final perch. It bolsters the view that her species - Australopithecus afarensis - spent at least some of its life in the trees.

Researchers announced Thursday that the timeline of Greece’s history needs to be pushed back by at least a quarter million years after a shocking discovery deep inside an open coal mine. Archaeologists uncovered the nation’s oldest archaeological site, which dates back at least 700,000 years. It is thought to be associated with some of our earliest hominin ancestors, according to The Associated Press. Although older archaeological sites have been uncovered in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, this is the first major discovery of this age in Greece, and may completely rewrite aspects of the nation’s human history. The...

If the claims are true, the behavior by Homo naledi—a baffling, small-brained member of the human family tree—would pre-date the earliest known burials by at least 100,000 years. An extinct human species that lived hundreds of thousands of years ago may have deliberately buried its dead and carved meaningful symbols deep in a South African cave—advanced behaviors generally deemed unique to Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens. If confirmed, the burials would be the earliest yet known by at least 100,000 years. The claims, made today in two research papers uploaded to the preprint server bioRxiv, were also announced by paleoanthropologist...

Like the teeth themselves, under the right conditions the gunk on your teeth may survive not just thousands but millions of years in the grave. Isn't that good to know.Advanced dental decay and plaque buildup have been detected in Dryopithecus carinthiacus, a primate that lived in Europe 12.5 million years ago, suggesting it doted on high-sugar fruit. Sivapithecus sivalensis, who lived between 9.3 to 8.7 million years ago in Pakistan, was also apparently frugivorous. Analysis of ancient plaque has shed light on the mobility of Neanderthals and other hominins, as implied by dietary changes, and shored up the thesis that...

The sixth century historian Procopius, in both his History of the Wars, and The Secret History, mentions a sea monster--a gigantic whale--named Porphyrios that dwelt in the Bosporus Strait and the Black Sea, and which terrorized the shipping lanes around Constantinople for about fifty years, and which causes significant headaches for the Emperor Justinian & the Roman navy. Our information is fairly limited, but what can we say about this real life Moby Dick?SOURCES:The Secret History, ProcopiusThe History of the Wars, ProcopiusA Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities, KaldellisPinned by The Historian's CraftPorphyrios: The Sea Monster that Terrorized the Late Roman Empire3:51...

Cast a net back 450 million years ago to the Ordovician Era, and you wouldn’t capture anything more than the ancestors of millipedes and worms. However, you might notice tall 29-feet-tall (8 meters) trunks without branches or leaves, towering over a landscape of newly-evolved vascular plants. These trunks, which have been found as fossils all over the world, are now strongly believed to be mushrooms—giant fungal towers that mean the kingdom of fungi produced the first giant land organism. The idea of a ‘fungal forest’ is one that’s often reproduced in fantasy and science-fiction writing. Mushrooms, for many, many reasons,...

In the film "10,000 BC," a band of hunters venture on an epic quest, overcoming prehistoric monsters to end up at a land of gods and pyramids. The fantastic creatures depicted in the movie — from the giant carnivorous birds to saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths — actually once existed. The most famous of the saber-toothed cats was Smilodon, a group of predators often dubbed saber-toothed tigers, although they were not actually close relatives of the modern tiger. Ironically, Smilodon was recently found to have had a relatively weak bite.

On the Ecological Connection Between Sabre-tooths and Hominids: Faunal Dispersal Events in the Lower Pleistocene and a Review of the Evidence for the First Human Arrival in Europe  Alfonso ArribasMuseo Geominero, Instituto Tecnológico Geominero de España. Ríos Rosas, 23. 28003 Madrid, Spain.Paul PalmqvistDepartamento de Geología y Ecología (Área de Paleontología), Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Málaga. 29071 Málaga, Spain. A reconstruction of a community of the large mammals of the Grecian Pleistocene .African Species in the Lower Pleistocene of Europe …The sabre-tooth genus Megantereon shares much in common with Smilodon, and both genera form the tribe Smilodontini. The earliest...

Sabertooth cats and other super-toothy predators apparently possessed mighty arms that they used to help them kill. The beefy arms would have served to pin down prey and protect the ferocious-looking teeth of the feline predators, which were actually fragile enough to fracture, scientists find. The finding also may hold for other knife-fanged prehistoric carnivores; long before sabertooth cats evolved, a number of now-extinct toothy hunters once roamed the Earth. These included the nimravids, or false sabertooth cats, which lived from 7 million to 42 million years ago alongside a sister group to cats known as barbourofelids, which lived from...

The Paleolithic site of Schöningen in north-central Germany is famous for the earliest known, completely preserved wooden weapons or artifacts uncovered there by archaeologists under the direction of Dr. Hartmut Thieme between 1994 and 1998 at an open-cast lignite mine. Deposited in organic sediments at a former lakeshore, they were found in combination with the remains of about 16,000 animal bones, including 20 wild horses, whose bones featured numerous butchery marks, including one pelvis that still had a spear protruding from it. The finds are considered evidence that early humans were active hunters with specialized tool kits as early as...

...the First Evidence of the Prehistoric Predator Roaming the State at the End of the Ice Age Between 13,605 and 13,460 Years Ago.The sabertoothed cat (Smilodon) is one of the best-known genera of the machairodont, an extinct subfamily of carnivoran mammals of the family Felidae (true cats). They are popularly referred to as "sabertoothed tigers", although they are not closely related to tigers (Panthera).The genus was named in 1842 based on fossils from Brazil; the generic name means "scalpel" or "two-edged knife" combined with "tooth".Researchers discovered the remarkably well-preserved skull in Page County, southwest Iowa...The skull belonged to a subadult...

The ancient sabretooth is not directly related to modern day cats, according to a new DNA analysis. Large cats such as the sabretooth roamed North and South America toward the end of the last Ice Age, around 13,000 years ago. The puma, also known as a mountain lion or cougar, and the jaguar are the only remaining large cats in the Western Hemisphere. Paleontologists have closely studied the extinct American cats based on their bone structure, but the proposed relationships remain contentious. To refine the branches of the feline family tree, Ross Barnett of the Henry Wellcome Ancient Biomolecules Centre...