The bird bones at Changma come in clusters, broken and crushed into tight little pellets, the kind of thing a modern owl coughs up after a meal. Hundreds of prehistoric birds, scattered through a fossil bed in northwestern China, some of them mangled in a way that screamed predator. For years nobody could say what … Read more
At one end of the family sits the tsetse fly, a strong flier with big eyes that picks out a buffalo or a person from across an African clearing. At the other end live the bat flies, eyeless or nearly so, scuttling through fur in the dark and almost never leaving their host. Two ways … Read more
The fossil had been catalogued, labelled and largely ignored for years. It sat in the research collection of the American Museum of Natural History under the name Tylosaurus proriger, a moderately famous marine reptile from the Late Cretaceous, the sort of specimen that turns up in mosasaur reviews as a known quantity. Amelia Zietlow, then … Read more
Hold a ruler alongside a standard doorframe and you get roughly two metres. The front leg bone of Nagatitan chaiyaphumensis is 1.78 metres long. A single limb, roughly as tall as a person, from an animal that nobody in science had heard of until last week. The bone sat in northeastern Thailand’s youngest dinosaur-bearing rock … Read more
Set a crab down on a beach and watch what happens. It doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t pivot awkwardly like a dog trying to reverse. It simply goes, sliding sideways as if the lateral direction were always the natural one, as if moving perpendicular to its own body axis were the most obvious thing in the world. … Read more
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