ENVIRONMENT & CLIMATEThink that you don’t have what it takes to start a career in paleontology, even though your fascination with dinosaurs never ends? Well never fear, news this week reveals that you’re never too old, or too young, to start on the hunt for dinosaurs. And 4-year-old Wylie Brys, of Mansfield, Texas, is proving this sentiment true.
Think that we’ve found just about every prehistoric species that there is to find? You’d be terrifyingly wrong if you said yes. In fact, adding a new view on the diversity of some unlikely large predators that predate humans, a new fossil this week revealed another species of South American “terror birds” known as Llallawavis scagliai.
Any paleontologist that is worth anything will tell you that there is no such thing as a brontosaurus. But a new paper published in PeerJ hopes to change that.
When you watch butterflies flutter through the sky and lobsters waddle in the sea, you may not readily believe that the two far off species have anything in common. But along with spiders, butterflies and lobsters share quite an interesting collective history-one where an ancient ancestor may have emerged from the sea. Cover the ocean, the land and the skies above the radiation of species into many forms are believed to have originated with a common ancestor as long as 508 million years ago. And in a new study published this week in the journal Paleontology researchers are finally giving a face to ancestor known as Yawunik kootenayi.
Scientists have unearthed fossils in North Carolina of a large land-dwelling crocodile that lived about 231 million years ago, walked on its hind legs and was the top land predator before dinosaurs even appeared.
Scientists, using a new 3-D scanning technique, have finally been able to make a reasonable estimate of the weight of the world's most famous Stegosaurus, Sophie.
Paleontologists have discovered a new species of reptile after putting together the remains of a new crocodile-like species that lived long before dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Those who have fishermen in the family know that the tales of fishing trips are often folkloric at their best. But would you be surprised to hear that ancient tales of a fishing trip, and perhaps some footprints to document the trip, may be one of the most important archaeological finds of the decade? Well it turns out neither did the pair of fishermen whose ever move was recorded below them in a shifting seabed, 5,000 years ago in the frigid waters of the southern Baltic Sea.