A colossal ancient whale could be the heaviest animal ever known
Move over, blue whales. There could be a new heavyweight champ in town. Fossilized vertebrae and ribs from a newly discovered ancient whale suggest that it could have outweighed modern blue whales, researchers report August 2 in Nature. If so, the extinct whale would be the heaviest animal ever known to exist. The roughly 39-million-year-old…
Dinosaurs and the evolution of breathing through bones
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…
Caught in the act: Mammal found with teeth sunk in a...
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…
Bizarre ancient sea creature brings evolution mystery to the surface
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…
This ancient, Lovecraftian apex predator chased and pierced soft prey
One of the earliest apex predators, and perhaps the freakiest to ever haunt the sea, may have also been a delicate eater. For decades, paleontologists have assumed that the long-extinct Anomalocaris canadensis — roughly translated as “the abnormal shrimp from Canada” — used two spiny appendages on its face to grab hard trilobites off the…
Smelling in stereo—a surprising find on a fossilized shark
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…
Megalodon sharks may have become megapredators by running hot
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated…
World’s largest predatory shark had elevated body temperature
The largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon, famous for its utterly enormous jaws and correspondingly huge teeth. Because of incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely…
Paleontology has a ‘parachute science’ problem. Here’s how it plays out...
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated…
A brand new dinosaur species with spiky armor was recently discovered...
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…
