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Some discoveries need a new dig site. This one needed a new lamp. For roughly 150 years, fossil slabs of the Jurassic fish Mesturus verrucosus have rested in museum collections across Europe, studied…
Picture the trail of islands and drowned peaks that runs northwest from Hawaii: the Hawaiian–Emperor chain, a conveyor belt of crust dragged over a fixed plume of hot rock rising from deep in the…
Erik Tihelka was leafing through a secondhand Russian paleontology textbook when a line drawing stopped him: a small, many-legged animal from a shale bed in West Texas, labeled a crustacean. He…
The chimneys at Lost City are the wrong color. Where the black smokers strung along the mid-ocean ridges build dark spires out of metal sulfide, this field on a bald dome of mantle rock in the…
A heatwave rarely leaves an obvious body count. There is no single moment, no wreckage to photograph. Most of the people it kills die at home or in hospital wards over a stretch of days, their deaths…
A fossil tells you that an animal lived. What it rarely tells you is what happened in the days and weeks after it died: the messy, crowded interval before burial, when a carcass becomes an ecosystem…
In a humid forest of conifers and ferns, in what is now Inner Mongolia, the loudest thing in the undergrowth may have been an animal no human ear could have picked up. Its song was made by scraping…
El Nino is famously a creature of the calendar. It flares roughly every two to seven years, tips global weather off its usual paths for a season or two, and fades. Ask what it does to the world's…
A thunderclap does two things at once. It rolls across the sky, and it pushes down. Part of that acoustic energy hits the ground and keeps going, converting into seismic waves that ripple through the…
Stand anywhere on the Tibetan Plateau and the word that comes to mind is flat: a cold, thin-aired tableland averaging more than 4,500 metres above sea level, earning its nickname as the Roof of the…
Picture a kangaroo the weight of the biggest reds alive today, but built wrong for the part: too stocky, too muscular, and by most reckoning barely able to hop. Protemnodon tumbuna seems to have…
Every asteroid carries a birth certificate, if you know where to look for it. It is written not in shape or size but in isotopes, the slightly different weights of the same chemical element, mixed in…