Palaeontology

Crocodiles are often thought of as living fossils, remaining unchanged since the time of the dinosaurs. But scientists have shown this is not always the case and that 150 million years ago, their feeding mechanisms were more similar to some mammals living today, the killer whales.

That particular area has very thick sediment deposits and, for a given interval of time, might contain 10 times more sediment as the well-known Hell Creek Formation in Montana. That means scientists have much greater detail as they try to determine what was happening at the time, Tobin said.

A new report describes the complete sequence of the Denisovan genome, shedding light on the relationships between these archaic humans, who were closely related to Neandertals, and modern humans.

24 November is a great day for palaeontology and evolutionary biology. Not only was it on this date in 1859 that Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” as it is commonly known, was published (it sold out on its first day and had to be re-printed), it was also the day, in 1974, when paleoanthropologists discovered Lucy, a 3.2 million year old skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, an extinct species of hominid.

Preserved for 230 million years in droplets of amber just millimeters long, two newly named species of mites and a fly have set a record.

The radula sounds like something from a horror movie – a conveyor belt lined with hundreds of rows of interlocking teeth. In fact, radulas are found in the mouths of most molluscs, from the giant squid to the garden snail. Now, a "prototype" radula found in 500-million-year-old fossils studied by University of Toronto graduate student Martin Smith, shows that the earliest radula was not a flesh-rasping terror, but a tool for humbly scooping food from the muddy sea floor.

About 110 million light years away, the bright, barred spiral galaxy NGC 3259 was just forming stars in dark bands of dust and gas. Here on the part of the Earth where NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center would eventually be built, a plant-eating dinosaur sensed predators nearby and quickened its pace, leaving a deep imprint in the Cretaceous mud.

Dinosaurs-like creatures may have injured themselves during leisurely deep-sea diving trips and not from resurfacing too quickly, as previously thought.

A team of palaeontologists have found evidence linking a fossil primate to modern day hominoids (known colloquially as apes).

Coryphodontids, are a group of extinct large herbivorous mammals widespread in Eurasia and North America from late Paleocene to middle Eocene, placed in the archaic, extinct order Pantodonta, and are among the most useful mammalian index fossils for stratigraphic correlations in North America.

The rise of the Rocky Mountains and the appearance of a major seaway that divided North America may have boosted the evolution of new dinosaur species, according to a new Ohio University-led study.

A team of researchers from the University of Bristol, Natural History Museum of London, the University of Missouri and Ohio University has discovered the eating habits of Diplodocus using a three-dimensional model of the dinosaur's skull.

High-tech technology, traditionally usually used to design racing cars and aeroplanes, has helped researchers to understand how plant-eating dinosaurs fed 150 million years ago.

Researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona identified in Lleida a series of dinosaur eggs with a unique characteristic: they are oval in shape. The discovery represents proof in favour of the hypothesis that birds and non avian theropods, dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, could have a common ancestor.

The ancient bones of newborns are very useful to recover the ancient DNA of the bacteria causing syphilis, the Treponema pallidum pallidum.