In recent decades, scientists have debated whether a seven-million-year-old fossil was bipedal—a trait that would make it the ...

An artificial island of sand dredged from Indonesia's seafloor has accidentally revealed evidence of a long-lost sunken world, inhabited by early humans. Scattered across the newly created island, ...

Ancient tiny fossils from Australia may carry evidence of great power: the ability to make oxygen through photosynthesis. The fossilized bacteria, dating from 1.73 billion to 1.78 billion years ago, ...

In 1859, Charles Darwin coined the term “living fossils” to describe organisms that show little species diversity or physical differences from their ancestors in the fossil record. In a new study, ...

For the more than 242 million years that lizards and snakes appear in the fossil record, they show up mostly as pieces of lizard jaws and snake vertebrae. Exactly why these parts survive as fossils ...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? A jawbone fossil from a previously unknown hominin was finally identified as ...

A fossil smaller than a human fingernail has revealed a complete ancient brain, turning a speck of stone into a detailed map ...

Grapes have been intertwined with the story of humanity for millennia, providing the basis for wines produced by our ancestors thousands of years ago — but that may not have been the case if dinosaurs ...

Jessica M. Theodor receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. She is a former president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Kenshu Shimada is chair ...

The global fossil record of squamates, which includes lizards, mosasaurs, snakes, and amphisbaenians (A) is overwhelmingly incomplete, with most fossil species containing less than 20% of the totality ...