Latest Fossil Stories
Rock formations in Western Australia may not only be some of the earliest evidence of life on Earth but also the first signs of biodiversity, scientists said on Wednesday.
It has been 2.3 billion years since Earth's atmosphere became infused with enough oxygen to support life as we know it. About the same time, the planet became encased in ice that some scientists speculate was more than a half-mile deep.
Swedish geologists have found fossilized feces from a worm that lived some 500 million years ago, media reports said Wednesday.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science recently discovered a new source of well-preserved ancient DNA in fossil bones. Their findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
UCLA paleobiologist J. William Schopf and colleagues have produced 3-D images of ancient fossils -- 650 million to 850 million years old -- preserved in rocks, an achievement that has never been done before.
Australia on Friday handed over to the Chinese government 10,000 fossils that had been illegally exported from China, including dinosaur eggs, ancient turtles and a saber-toothed cat, an official said.
South America has the most biodiversity of any major region today and according to an international team of researchers, that biodiversity began at least 52 million years ago.
A detailed and extensive new analysis of the fossil records of marine animals over the past 542 million years has yielded a stunning surprise. Biodiversity appears to rise and fall in mysterious cycles of 62 million years for which science has no satisfactory explanation.
Did life shape the early Earth, or did the early Earth shape life? The choice may be a false dichotomy, but living without light, water or oxygen gave the earliest microbes a limited menu to order their lives around. A scientist has proposed that evolution is the primary driving force in the early Earth's development.
Leptofoenus pittfieldae is an extinct species of wasp that lived during the Miocene Burdigalian stage. It was found encased in amber from the island of Hispaniola. This species was described by studying one individual that was found in a piece of amber, mined by the La Toca mine group in the Dominican Republic. Although amber is abundantly mined in that area, no other individuals of this species have been found. The specimen is now located in the University of Kansas Natural History Museum in...
Atrypa (lampshell) is an extinct genus of brachiopod from the Late Ordovician stage (444 million years ago) to the Carboniferous stage (318 mya). It occurs abundantly as fossils in marine rocks. Fossils have been found on all continents except Antarctica. This animal has distinctive concentric growth lines and is unusual in that in some Devonian beds there are numerous remains of the pedicle (foot) valve, but very few of the brachial (upper) valve -- scientists speculate that strong ocean...
Seitaad, derived from a Navajo legend of a san monster with the same name -- "Seit'aad," is a genus of prosauropod dinosaur from the Early Jurassic Period. The type species, S. ruessi, was described in 2010 based on fossils recovered from the Navajo Sandstone Formation in southern Utah. It is known from a nearly complete fossil that appears to have been entombed by the collapse of a sand dune about 185 million years ago. Based on the fossil, the dinosaur would have been 10 to 15 feet long...
- A political dynamiter.