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Laelaps is On the Move
I can’t remember the exact date anymore, but sometime last month I reached my six year science blogiversary. I was just a directionless Rutgers University undergraduate at the time I started writing. I...
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Carnivorous Neighbors — How Sabercats and a Bear Dog Managed to Coexist
A prehistoric graveyard reveals the remains of peacefully cohabiting carnivores. How did bear dogs and sabercats manage to get along? Our paleontology blogger, Brian Switek, uncovers some clues in his...
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Scientists Reveal Jurassic Forest’s Hidden Hangingfly
At first glance, the newly-named fossil hangingfly Juracimbrophlebia ginkgofolia doesn’t look especially impressive. Found in the roughly 165 million year old beds of China’s Jiulongshan Formation, and...
View ArticleA Feast of Feathery Fossil Posts
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and the American holiday wouldn’t be the same without moist slabs of gravy-drenched dinosaur meat on the table. Of course, our species was not the first to dine on dinosaur,...
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Great White Shark Ancestry Swims Into Focus
The potential connection between today's great white sharks and the giant fossil shark Carcharocles megalodon has intrigued the public, but scientists aren't so sure. New research casts further doubt...
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Eocene Big Bird Not so Scary, After All
The reign of the dinosaurs came to a catastrophic end 66 million years ago. That’s the common trope, anyway – a holdover from before we recognized that at least one feathery lineage survived and...
View ArticlePterosaur Takeoff Tussle Highlights Science News Fumble
Earlier this week I received a press release about pterosaur takeoffs from Texas Tech University. Rather than launching into the air through a pole-vault motion, as paleontologists such as Michael...
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Smilodon the Vampire
The North American saber-tooth cat, Smilodon, is a symbol of the big Ice Age animals that roamed the continent thousands of years ago. But the sabercat's gigantic fangs remain a mystery. The post...
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The Fall of the Carnivorous Mastodon
Extinction sucks. Only yesterday, in geologic terms, did mastodons, sabercats, giant ground sloths, and their charismatic Ice Age contemporaries roam North America. Humans even encountered these...
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Researchers Chew Over a Prehistoric Bear’s Diet
Of all the bears to come and go during the group’s 23 million year old history, none had a bite more powerful than Agriotherium africanum – a ursid as large as today’s grizzly and polar bears that...
View ArticlePBS Investigates a Sperm Whale From the Outside In
Watch Inside Nature’s Giants: “Sperm Whale” – Preview on PBS. See more from Inside Nature’s Giants. [Inside Nature's Giants - "Sperm Whale" - will air via PBS stations on Wednesday, January 18th.] The...
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Stressed Lemurs and Grass-Eating Humans
In his 1960 presidential address to the South African Archaeological Society, the anthropologist Louis Leakey cast the fossil humans that had been found in that country as little more than a collection...
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Lucy’s Feet Were Arched and Stiff, Just Like Ours
How did Lucy walk? Although the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton shows that she was undoubtedly an upright walker, our incomplete knowledge of her feet has fed a long-running debate about the...
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Ancient Tools May Mark Earlier Path Out of Africa
The bodies are still missing, but a prehistoric toolkit discovered in the United Arab Emirates has led some archaeologists to propose a more complex scenario for humanity’s emigration out of Africa....
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Fossil Finger DNA Points to New Type of Human
Continued study of an approximately 40,000 year old finger bone from Siberia has identified a previously unknown type of human — one that may have interbred with the ancestors of modern-day Melanesian...
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6 Strange Fossils That Enlightened Evolutionary Scientists
Critics of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution often cited the fossil record's lack of creatures “caught in the act” of evolution. And though fossils had been important to the development of Darwin’s...
View ArticleBook Excerpt: The Dinosaur Fossils That Changed Everything
Footprints and Feathers on the Sands of Time Humans have been finding the traces of extinct creatures for thousands of years. Unaware of their true identity, a variety of cultures have interpreted...
View ArticleVideo: Sloth’s Strange Walk Is Really Just Upside Down (and Sloooow)
Two-toed sloths spend a lot of time hanging upside down from tropical tree branches in Central and South America, and looking very odd. But new research suggests they move just like a mirror image of...
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A Third of ‘Extinct’ Mammals May Still Be Alive
There may be many more “extinct” mammals waiting to be rediscovered than conservation biologists previously thought. Categorizing a mammal species as extinct has rested upon two criteria: It has not...
View ArticleDirty Browsers – Determining a menu for North America’s fossil camels
Even with the young politician Jefferson Davis behind their adoption by the military, camels were a hard sell to the U.S. government. Along with other military men, Davis was convinced that camels...
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