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A lump of fossilized dinosaur dung collected in eastern Montana in 2016 has turned out to be packed with feathers, and a University of Washington-led team reports that two of them have features…
A fossil of Charnia, a frond-like organism that lived about 560 million years ago, has been found preserved in three dimensions in a sheep field in Finnmark, Arctic Norway. A team led by the…
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have sequenced nuclear paleogenomes from two fossils of Miracinonyx trumani (the extinct animal long called the American cheetah) and found it…
The Hengduan Mountains run north to south along the eastern edge of Tibet, a corrugation of steep ridges and deep river gorges that packs alpine meadow, conifer forest and subtropical valley within a…
Run a physics-based earthquake simulation and what comes back is oddly incomplete. The mechanics are sound (a fault ruptures, waves spread through layered rock, all of it solved from first…
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…