Scientists in Chile’s Patagonia region are unearthing the southernmost dinosaur fossils recorded outside Antarctica, including remains of megaraptors that would have dominated the area’s food chain before their mass extinction. Fossils of megaraptors, a carnivorous dinosaur that inhabited parts of South America during the Cretaceous period some 70 million years ago, were found in sizes […]
Plying the subtropical seas that washed the coasts of the archipelago that made up Europe 83 million years ago was one of the largest turtles on record, a reptile the size of a small car—a Mini Cooper to be precise—that braved dangerous waters. Researchers on Thursday described remains discovered in northeastern Spain of a turtle […]
Animal life may have existed on earth millions of years before most scientific evidence show. Geologist Elizabeth Turner recently discovered the fossil of a sponge in rock samples in northwestern Canada. Scientists say the primitive animal’s remains could be as much as 890 million years old. That would pre-date it from similar fossils by 350-million […]
BUENOS AIRES—Scientists have unearthed in Argentina’s Patagonian wilderness fossils of what may be the oldest-known member of the dinosaur group known as titanosaurs that includes the largest land animals in Earth’s history. Researchers said on Monday the fossils represent a dinosaur species named Ninjatitan zapatai that lived 140 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. […]
Russian divers are braving the extreme cold to recover valuable fossils. These bones tell the tale of some of the species that have been long-extinct on Earth. Ancient sharks’ teeth and bones of woolly rhinoceroses have attracted Russian paleontologists to the ice-covered Tobol river some 1,200 miles east of Moscow. This year’s findings will be transferred […]
HELENA, Mont.—Dinosaur fossils worth millions of dollars unearthed on a Montana ranch belong to the owners of the land’s surface rights, not the owners of the mineral rights, a U.S. appeals court ruled. The June 17 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2016 decision by U.S. District Judge Susan Watters […]
VALLEY FORGE, Pa.—The national park on the site where George Washington and the struggling Continental Army endured a tough winter during the American Revolution boasts a new feature that’s a couple of hundred million years old—dozens of fossilized dinosaur footprints discovered on rocks used to pave a section of a hiking trail. The trace fossils, […]
A scientist is suggesting humans reached the Americas 130,000 years ago. That’s 115,000 years earlier than first thought. Critics and skeptics are doubting his findings, probably because they would rewrite history. He is proving his theory with fossils found at a freeway construction site. The way the bones were broken suggests human methods that were […]
Microfossils of microbes almost 4.3 billion years old found in Canada are similar to the bacteria that thrive today around sea-floor hydrothermal vents and may represent the oldest-known evidence of life on Earth, scientists said on Wednesday (March 1). The fossils from the Hudson Bay shoreline in northern Quebec near the Nastapoka Islands lend credence […]
A technique using high-powered lasers to reveal hidden soft tissue alongside bones in fossils is allowing scientists to better study small feathered dinosaurs similar to birds, a Hong Kong paleontologist revealed on Wednesday (March 1). The technique—called laser-stimulated fluorescence (LSF)—involves sweeping laser light across a specimen, which highlights otherwise invisible details on objects. At a news […]
