Submerged to the nostrils in warm, slow water, the animal waited. It had been waiting a long time, probably; crocodiles are good at that. Around it, the Hadar floodplain spread out in a patchwork of gallery forest and open grassland, lakes edged with sedge, streams running amber with silt. And somewhere along the bank, at … Read more
The left femur is about as long as your finger. Seventy-five millimetres of hollow bone, light enough that a poodle-sized animal could carry it without much effort, robust enough to reveal something odd: it grew faster, and thicker at the top, than the corresponding arm bone from the same species. Thirty-three complete femora from a … Read more
The species boundary is one of biology’s oldest fictions. A line we draw, then argue about, then redraw. In the rainforests of Malaysian Borneo, a group of small brown frogs with tooth-like projections on their jaws has been making that argument embarrassingly concrete for the last two decades, and a new genomic study has now … Read more
THE BONES had been sitting in a Patagonian hillside for 90 million years when a field team finally coaxed them out in 2014. Even then, it would take another decade before the fossil of Alnashetri cerropoliciensis — a bird-like dinosaur about the size of a large chicken, weighing under a kilogram — was ready to … Read more
The bones were so small that at first glance they looked like they might belong to juveniles. But Fidel Torcida Fernández-Baldor of the Dinosaur Museum of Salas de los Infantes reckoned otherwise. Scattered across the Burgos Province site in northern Spain, the delicate fossils represented at least five individuals—all adults, all impossibly tiny for dinosaurs. … Read more
Fossil Graveyard In Qatar Recasts The History Of The Arabian Gulf The sun-drenched, rocky desert of southwestern Qatar holds a powerful contradiction: a vast, 21-million-year-old cemetery of marine mammal bones. This fossil site, locally known as Al Maszhabiya, or the “dugong cemetery,” dates back to the Early Miocene epoch and has yielded a discovery that … Read more
The throat bone did not lie. After decades of paleontologists insisting that Nanotyrannus was just a scrawny adolescent Tyrannosaurus rex, a microscopic examination of a single hyoid bone has proven them wrong. The 18-foot predator was fully grown when it died, a distinct species hunting alongside its gigantic cousins in the final days before the … Read more
For at least 45 million years, global shark and ray diversity has been sliding downhill, not climbing, and today’s crisis looks less like a blip than a long, slow collapse. In a new fossil analysis published in the journal Scientific Reports, an international team led by Manuel A. Staggl at the University of Vienna assembled … Read more
The world’s strangest dinosaur just got stranger. Newly unearthed fossils of Spicomellus afer from Morocco reveal a creature clad in bone spikes from head to tail, some measuring nearly a meter long. The discovery, led by researchers from the Natural History Museum in London, the University of Birmingham, and Moroccan collaborators, shows that ankylosaurs had … Read more
A terrifying predator lurked in prehistoric Patagonia. A newly described species, Kostensuchus atrox, stretched 11.5 feet long, weighed about 250 kilograms, and likely dined on dinosaurs. Unearthed near El Calafate, Argentina, the exquisitely preserved fossil reveals a broad-snouted, hypercarnivorous crocodyliform that roamed the Chorrillo Formation floodplains about 70 million years ago, just before the mass … Read more