They hovered in the skies of the Earth 300 million years ago… The giant dragonflies will soon be the stars of the paleontology gallery of France’s Natural History Museum in Paris.
Articles on Fossils
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Death is inevitable for individuals and also for species. With help from the fossil record, paleontologists are piecing together what might make one creature more vulnerable than another.
We know of about 900 valid dinosaur species that existed. ‘Valid’ means scientists know the dinosaur from enough of the skeleton bones to feel pretty sure that it differs from other known dinosaurs.
Sexual organs similar to what we see in sharks and rays today appeared many millions of years ago in much more primitive ancient fishes than was previously thought.
Did you recently hear news that Earth’s oldest pigments were hot pink? That’s not quite right. When they were in living bacteria a billion years ago, they were performing photosynthesis – and green.
The Earth is losing more and more biodiversity every day, and we should all be worried
Brindabellaspis had eyes on the top of the head, facing upwards, and a skull stretched into a long and broad snout. Although around 400 million years old, it was clearly a specialised fish.
Following NASA’s latest discovery of organic matter on the red planet, new findings in a salt lake in California could point to where to look for alien life.
The discovery of two separate fossils tetrapod species proves that they lived all over the world by the end of Devonian.
The 19th-century British anatomist Richard Owen downplayed the role of colonial contributors and largely ignored the importance of Aboriginal testimony and knowledge in describing the marsupial lion.
NASA and ESA have signed a letter of intent to collect samples from Mars and return them to Earth.
How we discovered ancient footprints of early human hunters and their megafauna prey.
A study has found that a local event rather than a global shift in climate caused the mass extinction in South Africa.
A jaw bone found on a beach in Somerset could be from the largest ichthyosaur of its kind ever discovered.
How we found the oldest human fossil ever discovered outside Africa and the Levant.
DNA studies reveal that African elephants belong to a very successful and widespread family.
New research uses pathology in dinosaur bones to look at predator-prey interactions in the fossil record.
Plants, in their fossil forms, can reveal a great deal about past environments and climates.
Bipedal movement has existed in modern reptiles for much longer than we previously knew.
Little skates that ‘walk’ across the ocean floor show how fish brains evolved to pave the way for working legs.
Top contributors
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Research Associate, African Centre for Coastal Palaeoscience, Nelson Mandela University
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Associate professor in Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of the Witwatersrand
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Emeritus Strategic Professor in Palaeontology, Flinders University
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Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology, University of Bristol
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Senior Research Scientist, South Australian Museum; Flinders University
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Associate Professor in Vertebrate Palaeontology, Flinders University
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Honorary Research Associate, Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand
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Research Associate in the College of Science and Engineering, Flinders University
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Research Associate, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University
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Professor of Palaeobiology, University of Leicester
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Technical Specialist in Earth Sciences, University of Bristol
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Professor in Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University
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Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences at the University of Bath, University of Bath
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Associate Professor in Ancient DNA, University of Otago
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Lecturer in the School of Applied Sciences, Edinburgh Napier University