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The cave is cool and damp -- prefect for preserving prehistoric remains, Meachen says. "It's like a refrigerator in there, and probably has been for 20,000 years," she said. "Some of the bones we're finding there have collagen in them. That is where you could get the ancient DNA." The scientists saw bones falling out of a part of the cave, and decided to start digging there. "That was the fossil layer," she said. "There is so much to dig. We have two more years for funding that we can be out there, so we are going to try to...

(Reuters) - Scientists excavating an ancient Wyoming sinkhole containing a rare trove of fossils of Ice Age mammals have unearthed hundreds of bones of such prehistoric animals as American cheetahs, a paleontologist said on Friday. The two-week dig by an international team of researchers led by Des Moines University paleontologist Julie Meachen marked the first exploration of Natural Trap Cave at the base of the Bighorn Mountains in north-central Wyoming since its initial discovery in the 1970s. Meachen said the extensive excavation that began late last month uncovered roughly 200 large bones of animals like horses that roamed North America...

The collective noun is a terror of tyrannosaurs: a pack of the prehistoric predators, moving and hunting in numbers, for prey that faced the fight of its life. That tyrannosaurs might have hunted in groups has long been debated by dinosaur experts, but with so little to go on, the prospect has remained firmly in the realm of speculation. But researchers in Canada now claim to have the strongest evidence yet that the ancient beasts did move around in packs. At a remote site in north-east British Columbia - in the west of Canada - they uncovered the first known...

The primitive folk assessed by many archaeologists as being the original native Americans – that is, the Clovis people – killed and ate the lovable prehistoric elephants that inhabited the continent alongside them, scientists say. The proto-dumbo species in question is known as the gomphothere. Until recently, it had been thought that gomphotheres had disappeared from North America well before human beings showed up, but new fossil evidence appears to show that at least one cuddly tusker was brutally killed by Clovis people around 13,400 years ago. The luckless pachyderm was then scoffed by its peckish assailants. "This is the...

A fossil found in South Carolina has revealed a gigantic bird that apparently snatched fish while soaring over the ocean some 25 million to 28 million years ago. Its estimated wingspan of around 21 feet is bigger than the height of a giraffe. …

Want to find the nearest pterosaur? There's an app for that — or a database, at least. A newly developed website catalogs more than 1,300 specimens of extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs, thus enabling users to map out the ancient creatures on Google Earth. The goal is to help researchers find trends in the evolution and diversity of these ancient winged reptiles. "Having a very specific database like this, which is just for looking at individual fossil specimens of pterosaurs, is very helpful, because you can ask questions that you couldn't have answered with bigger databases [of more animals]," said...

Elephant Butte is a small city in New Mexico that calls itself the “Diamond in the Desert.” As KRQE News 13 reports, it was in this scenic location that a group of friends celebrating a bachelor party made an astonishing find – a giant fossil of the tusk and skull of what’s believed to be a Stegomastodon. According to the University of Nebraska State Museum, Stegomastodons were, “the last surviving member of a lineage of primitive tuskers called ‘gomphotheres’ which first entered North America 15 million years ago.”

Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall. Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus. Scientists believe it is a new species of titanosaur - an enormous herbivore dating from the Late Cretaceous period. A local farm worker first stumbled on the remains in the desert near La Flecha, about 250km (135 miles) west of Trelew, Patagonia.

It’s a disaster scenario that Hollywood has picked up on (think Deep Impact). An incoming object menaces the Earth. Scientists try to destroy it with nuclear weapons, but the horrified populace soon discovers that the blast has simply broken the object into pieces, each with the potential to wreak havoc planet-wide. Now we learn that an impact between two asteroids causing a similar crack-up may have resulted in the cataclysmic event some 65 million years ago that destroyed the dinosaurs. Researchers from Southwest Research Institute and Charles University (Prague) have been studying the asteroid (298) Baptistina, combining their observations with...

Arlington, Va.—How land-living animals evolved from fish has long been a scientific puzzle. A key missing piece has been knowledge of how the fins of fish transformed into the arms and legs of our ancestors. In this week's issue of the journal Science, paleontologists Neil Shubin and Michael Coates from the University of Chicago and Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, describe a remarkable fossil that bridges the gap between fish and amphibian and provides a glimpse of the structure and function changes from fin to limb. The fossil, a 365-million-year-old arm bone, or humerus, shares...

A dinosaur creche has been found entombed in the volcanic debris that engulfed it on a hillside 123 million years ago. Six young Psittacosaurus, all less than three years old, died side by side. It is the earliest known dinosaur nursery... Paul Barrett, of the Natural History Museum in London, one of the researchers, said that the fossilised juveniles appeared to have formed a creche but it was impossible to be sure if they were part of a larger herd or if they grouped together for protection. "This is the first time we've found a group of these dinosaurs together....

A dinosaur mystery that puzzled paleontologists for nearly a century has been solved by a pound of beef tendons from a butcher, a collection of dead hawks and a brace of frozen quail, two investigative scientists in Berkeley and Idaho say. The puzzle: Why were fossils of those ancient creatures so often discovered buried with their heads, necks and feet arched bizarrely backward into a distorted posture unlike anything seen alive? The answer: Kevin Padian, a noted dinosaur expert and curator of the Museum of Paleontology at UC Berkeley, and Cynthia Marshall Faux, a veterinarian and paleontologist at the Museum...

(Reuters) - You've heard of the Model T Ford, the famed early 20th-century automobile that was the forerunner of the modern car. But how about the Model T shark? Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of the impeccably preserved fossilized remains of a shark that lived 325 million years ago in what is now Arkansas, complete with a series of cartilage arches that supported its gills and jaws. :snip: Employing sophisticated equipment at the European Synchrotron in France, the scientists used high-resolution X-rays to obtain a detailed view of the shape and organization of the arches and associated structures. They...

The beer will be called Bone Dusters Paleo Ale (Hardy har har [Okay, actually, "paleo ale" is pretty good]). The yeast come from the surface of one of the oldest marine mammal fossils ever discovered in the western hemisphere. The idea for the beer came from Jason Osborne, who co-directs a nonprofit dedicated to advancing paleontology and geology. A paleo beer, Osborne thought, would be a great hook to interest non-scientists in fossils. I think many non-scientists are quite interested in fossils already, but I cannot argue against a paleo beer. Will whale-fossil beer really taste that different from other...

Scientists Have Found An Ancient Fossilized Mosquito Full Of Blood Jennifer Welsh Oct. 14, 2013, 5:37 PMBlood engorged mosquito Researchers have just published an exciting find: a 46-million-year-old mosquito full of blood. Next stop "Jurassic Park"? Not so fast. The find is really interesting because it's the first example of blood-feeding in these ancient insects. We hadn't had clear evidence of when this began until now. They found the mosquito in shale sediments in Montana. They first found the presence of iron in the female mosquito's belly, then used a non-destructive technique to study the molecules inside the find. They...

Cat-sized reptiles once roamed what is now the icebox of Antarctica, snuggling up in burrows and peeping above ground to snag plant roots and insects. The evidence for this scenario comes from preserved burrow casts discovered in the Transantarctic Mountains, which extend 3,000 miles (4,800 km) across the polar continent and contain layers of rock dating back 400 million years. "We've got good evidence that these burrows were made by land-dwelling animals rather than crayfish," said lead researcher Christian Sidor, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Washington and curator at UW's Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. Ancient...

LONDON (AP) — They were a British family on a day out — almost a million years ago. Archaeologists announced Friday that they have discovered human footprints in England that are between 800,000 and 1 million years old — the most ancient found outside Africa, and the earliest evidence of human life in northern Europe.

Scientists have discovered a freakish, birdlike species of dinosaur — 11 feet long, 500 pounds, with a beak, no teeth, a bony crest atop its head, murderous claws, prize-fighter arms, spindly legs, a thin tail and feathers sprouting all over the place. Officially, it’s a member of a group of dinosaurs called oviraptorosaurs. Unofficially, it’s the Chicken From Hell.

Genesis Science Is Practical, Not Just Academic by James J. S. Johnson, J.D., Th.D. * “It doesn’t really matter, in the real world, what you believe about creation or evolution,” the college student glibly challenged me. “Whether the evolutionists are right or whether Genesis is right makes no practical difference in how science works or in how people live their lives.” With a grin and a wave of his hand, the sophomore dismissed the real-world relevance of biblical creation as if it were no more practical than evolutionary myths. Was he correct? Is the Genesis record of God’s creation (and...

A 'Jurassic Park' in China was once home to dinosaurs that lived among early mammals, amphibians and other strange creatures 160 million years ago. The extraordinary fossil bed contains the bones of pterosaurs - early mammals – including the first known swimming mammal with a beaver-like tail, the earliest gliding mammal and feathered dinosaurs. Their remarkably preserved remains were discovered in rocks beneath the Jehol Biota in north eastern China - a famous collection of 130 million-year-old fossils from the Cretaceous Period. The latest discovery sheds light on life in the Middle-Upper Jurassic 30million years earlier when birds are believed...