Palaeontology

A new study led by Swansea University and the University of Bristol has revealed the size of the legendary giant shark Megalodon, including fins that are as large as an adult human.

University of Alberta graduate student Scott Melnyk made an intriguing fossil find during a graduate-level course-and ended up identifying the fossilized tracks of a newly discovered wood-boring organism in a new study.

New research suggests that American mastodons were avid travelers, migrating vast distances across North America in response to dramatic climate change during the ice ages of the Pleistocene.

How do you weigh a long-extinct dinosaur? A couple of ways, as it turns out, neither of which involve actual weighing -- but according to a new study, different approaches still yield strikingly similar results.

Scientists have uncovered the earliest known evidence of an insect mimicking a lichen as a survival strategy.

A joint research team led by Dr. MAO Fangyuan from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Prof. MENG Jin from the American Museum of Natural History has reported a new multituberculate mammal, Sinobaatar pani, with well-preserved middle ear bones.

Palaeontologists from the Natural History Museums in Luxembourg and Maastricht have discovered a previously unknown species of brittle star that lived in the shallow, warm sea which covered parts of the present-day Netherlands at the end of the Dinosaur Era.

When paleontologists digging in a quarry in southwestern China uncovered the nearly complete skeleton of a giant, dolphin-like marine reptile known as an ichthyosaur, they didn't expect to find another fossil in its stomach.

Some 240 million years ago, a dolphin-like ichthyosaur ripped to pieces and swallowed another marine reptile only a little smaller than itself.

Weighing up to 8,000 pounds, hadrosaurs, or duck-billed dinosaurs were among the largest dinosaurs to roam the Earth. How did the skeletons of these four-legged, plant-eating dinosaurs with very long necks support such a massive load?

If you could dive down to the ocean floor nearly 540 million years ago just past the point where waves begin to break, you would find an explosion of life--scores of worm-like animals and other sea creatures tunneling complex holes and structures in the mud and sand--where before the environment had been mostly barren.

New research using the most comprehensive study of feathered dinosaurs and early birds has revised the evolutionary relationships of dinosaurs at the origin of birds.

A new study by Palaeontologists at the University of Southampton suggests four bones recently found on the Isle of Wight belong to new species of theropod dinosaur, the group that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and modern-day birds.

A new study, revisiting fossil specimens from the enormous crocodylian, Deinosuchus, has confirmed that the beast had teeth "the size of bananas", capable to take down even the very largest of dinosaurs.

Researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Chinese Academy of Sciences and University of Rennes in France have unveiled a stunning 99-million-year-old fossil pristinely preserving an enigmatic insect predator from the Cretaceous Period -- a 'hell ant' (haidomyrmecine) -- as it embraced its unsuspecting final victim, an extinct relative of the cockroach known as Caputoraptor elegans.