Paleontology

Researchers in China have described a Late Jurassic fossil that sits near the base of the bird family tree and, they report, could not fly. The animal, named Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, comes from the…

A fossil from the Middle Jurassic of China has been described with its throat intact: the bony roof of the passage and the small bones that sit inside it, parts that almost never survive in an animal…

The animal is 322 millimeters long, dried to a yellow-beige, and it has sat in a cabinet in southern Germany since the late 1980s. For most of that time it carried a name: Bathynomus giganteus, the…

Bone fragments too small to identify by shape, from Denisova Cave and other sites in southern Siberia, carried the DNA of an extinct relative of cattle and yaks that has never been described. These…

Two slabs of rock, one from southern China and one from southern Mongolia, look much the same under a microscope. Both are crowded with the preserved shapes of tiny organisms. In neither can anyone…

A fossil named in 1990 as the earliest known reptile is not a reptile at all. Writing in Nature on September 30, 2026, Ben Igielman of the University of Oxford, Roger Benson of the American Museum of…

Every fossil dig is a bet placed on a piece of ground. A team reads the geology, raises the money, spends a season in the sun, and only afterward learns whether that rock had anything left to say.…

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…

Charcoal buried in rock drilled from the seafloor off West Antarctica records forests and bogs that burned again and again about 900 kilometers from where the South Pole then sat, at a time when 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…