In the blazing heat of an Australian summer in 2017, paleontologists were scraping away ancient rock in the Winton Formation of Queensland when they stumbled upon something that would electrify dinosaur science: a fractured layer of stone that, at first glance, looked like little more than jumbled debris. But locked inside this rock lay a … Read more
Ten thousand years ago, in the shadowy forests and plains of South America, vast beasts lumbered beneath the canopy. Among them was Notiomastodon platensis, a close cousin of elephants, whose massive feet padded across ancient landscapes where Chilean palms dropped heavy fruits and monkey puzzle trees raised their spiny crowns toward the sky. Their trunks … Read more
In the remote, sunburned badlands of Petrified Forest National Park, where ancient rocks lie scattered like forgotten ruins and time itself seems fossilized into the earth, a team of scientists has uncovered a relic from a world on the cusp of transformation. It is not just a bone, nor merely a fossil. It is a … Read more
More than half a billion years ago, long before the rise of dinosaurs, mammals, or even fish with jaws, the oceans teemed with strange and alien creatures. Among them was a newly discovered predator that challenges what scientists thought they knew about early life on Earth. With a body the length of an index finger, … Read more
In the dusty upper layers of northeastern China’s Nenjiang Formation, twelve isolated but revelatory relics of a lost world have been unearthed—fossilized teeth that once lined the jaws of thunderous herbivores and agile predators of the Late Cretaceous. What appears modest in scale—a mere dozen teeth emerging from a layer scarcely ten centimeters thick—has proven … Read more