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
In a stunning reversal of more than a century of misidentification, researchers have revealed that a fossil long thought to be a caterpillar, millipede, or marine worm is actually a lobopodian—an ancient, soft-bodied relative of modern arthropods. Even more surprising, it lived in freshwater, not the ocean. This makes Palaeocampa anthrax the first known nonmarine … Read more
In the complex world of ant colonies, who becomes a queen and who stays a worker isn’t just about size—it’s about what that size means, genetically. A new study from Rockefeller University, published in PNAS, reveals that while larger ants are more likely to develop queen-like traits, genes ultimately determine how body size maps to … Read more
The extreme appetite for ants and termites has independently emerged in mammals at least 12 separate times over the past 66 million years, according to new research that reveals one of evolution’s most unusual dietary obsessions. Scientists at New Jersey Institute of Technology traced this specialized feeding strategy across thousands of mammal species, discovering that … Read more
Elephant-sized sloths once roamed from Alaska to Argentina, carving caves with massive claws and diving into oceans for seagrass meals. These ancient giants, some weighing 8,000 pounds, dominated the Americas for over 30 million years before vanishing around 15,000 years ago—just as humans spread across the continents. A new study published in Science reveals how … Read more