Paleontology

Pond scums were an animal’s best friend. 540 million years ago, oxygen was scarce in the atmosphere and ocean, and animals needed to find oxygen to make a living. If you think farming is hard…

This specimen of the theropod dinosaur Torvosaurus tanneri is on display in Madrid, Spain. The genus Torvosaurus includes a unique species of megalosaurid theropod dinosaur. They are found in the…

Kaikaifilu is a new species of giant sea lizard (mosasaur) discovered in 66 million year-old rocks of Antarctica. At about 10 m long, it is the largest known top marine predator from this continent.…

Thanks, but no thanks, say British scientists about controversial British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, primarily known for his criticism of religion. A majority of those surveyed who…

A new hypothesis aims to explain how the complex vertebrate body, with its skeleton, muscles, nervous and cardiovascular systems, arises from a single cell during development and how these systems…

A new paper in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology reviewed all mammal species known from the end of the Cretaceous period in North America and found that over 93 percent became extinct across the…

A close-up of the dentition of an ancient marine, carnivorous lizard, the mighty Mosasaur, from Late Cretaceous exposures on Vancouver Island. Mosasaurs were air breathers and powerful swimmers.…

A great temple to the god Amon was built at Karnak in Upper Egypt around c. 1785. It is from Amon that we get his cephalopod namesake. Pliny the Elder, who lived around 79 AD near Pompeii, called…

This Jurassic ammonite is from an all but inaccessible site in Sayward, Bonanza Group, Vancouver Island. By the time these ammonites were being buried in sediment, Wrangellia, the predominately…

Today in Science Codex I read this article Monster mystery solved The Monster is a strange fossil, found only in the Mazon Creek fossil beds, roughly 30 miles south-west of Chicago.  It was…