fossils

Henry Sharpe / AMNH In 2015, Deborah Shepherd returned to the site where she and other volunteers had worked on a public fossil dig with family members. That’s when she saw it: a fossil lying there, exposed on the surface. Most people would not have recognized it for what it was: It wasn’t a skull,…

Jiri Svoboda Trilobites first appear early in the Cambrian and are one of the earliest examples of arthropods, the group that includes all insects. They flourished for over 100 million years, leaving fossils that are seemingly ubiquitous—we've described over 20,000 different trilobite species. That's over three times the number of mammalian species we're aware of.…

Enlarge / The fish in question, with the ammonite located just below its spine.Cooper, et. al. Some extinct species left copious fossil remnants of their existence. Ammonites—an extinct type of cephalopod—are one such example. From the Devonian through the Paleocene, wherever ancient seas once covered Earth, one can usually find their coiled shells. So one…

A Yukon gold miner discovered a mangled ball of fur about the size of a large grapefruit. X-rays show the fur ball is a curled-up ice-age squirrel in "great condition," scientists told CBC. The squirrel is estimated to be 30,000 years old and likely died during hibernation. Loading Something is loading. Thanks for signing up!…

Enlarge / Artist's conception of the newly found species.Matheus Fernandes It was relatively small in comparison to the giants that would follow it later in Earth’s history. With a hip height of approximately 0.3 meters (about a foot) and a length of perhaps a meter (roughly three feet), this ancient reptile existed long before the…

Enlarge / It takes careful study and the right kind of bones to determine how something like this breathed. Somewhere in Earth’s past, some branches on the tree of life adopted a body plan that made breathing and cooling down considerably more efficient than how mammalian bodies like ours do it. This development might not…

Enlarge / The two skeletons are completely intertwined.Gang Han A new fossil described this week captures two intertwined animals caught in a life-or-death struggle right before both were entombed in a volcanic event. Published in Scientific Reports this Tuesday, the fossil doesn’t capture one dinosaur attacking another—rather, the predator in this case is a smaller…

Enlarge / That blue tube is actually a very close relative of vertebrates. Beneath the waves, there are strange, almost alien creatures that raise questions about the evolution of life on Earth and our own earliest origins. The answers might be hiding in tunicates. Tunicates are filter-feeding invertebrates that include sea squirts and salps. The…

Enlarge / Artist's reconstruction of the shark as it once lived. Sharks are largely cartilaginous, a body structure that often doesn’t survive fossilization. But in a paper published in the Swiss Journal of Paleontology, scientists describe an entirely new species of primitive shark from the Late Devonian period, a time when they were just beginning…

A new species of dinosaur, Vectipelta barretti, was discovered on England's Isle of Wight. The new species is an ankylosaur, with dorsal armor made up of plates, spikes, and curved spines. Researchers will have to examine other ankylosaur fossils to see if they belong to the new species. Loading Something is loading. Thanks for signing…