The end-Permian mass extinction (EPME), approximately 252 million years ago (Ma), caused a serious marine and terrestrial ecosystem crisis, and about 75% of terrestrial biological species disappeared. How long did it take for terrestrial ecosystems to recover?
A fossilised seal tooth found on a Victorian beach could hold the key to uncovering the history and geography of earless seals that graced Australia's shores three million years ago.
Researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found a new species of sandgrouse in six to nine million-year-old rocks in Gansu Province in western China.
Hot on the heels of a recent paper discovering three new species of pterosaur, University of Portsmouth palaeobiologists have identified another new species - the first of its kind to be found on African soil.
Taking the evolutionary plunge into water and abandoning land for good, as some crocodilian ancestors did nearly 200 million years ago, is often framed as choosing freedom: from gravity, from territorial boundaries, from dietary constraints.
The mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period 252 million years ago — one of the great turnovers of life on Earth — appears to have played out differently and at different times on land and in the sea, according to newly redated fossils beds from South Africa and Australia.
Three new species of toothed pterosaurs -- flying reptiles of the Cretaceous period, some 100 million years ago -- have been identified in Africa by an international team of scientists led by Baylor University.
The former coalfield of Geiseltal in eastern Germany has yielded large numbers of exceptionally preserved fossil animals, giving palaeontologists a unique window into the evolution of mammals 47 million years ago.
