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Scientists have debated whether the dinosaurs were already in decline before a massive asteroid impact finished them off 66 million years ago. New research shows they were thriving in their final days. Help EarthSky keep going! Please donate what you can to our annual crowd-funding campaign.Dinosaurs once reigned on Earth, until a cataclysmic event – now thought to have been a massive asteroid impact, or possibly intense volcanic activity – wiped them out about 66 million years ago during the Maastrichtian age at the end the Late Cretaceous epoch. This mass extinction event was sudden and brutal, powerful enough to...

Researchers at UCLA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have confirmed that microscopic fossils discovered in a nearly 3.5 billion-year-old piece of rock in Western Australia are the oldest fossils ever found and indeed the earliest direct evidence of life on Earth. An example of one of the microfossils discovered in a sample of rock recovered from the Apex Chert, a rock formation in western Australia that is among the oldest and best-preserved rock deposits in the world. The fossils were first described in 1993 but a 2017 study published by UCLA and UW-Madison scientists used sophisticated chemical analysis to confirm...

Planet Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The first primitive forms of life appeared about 4 billion years ago. Natural selection did the rest, giving rise to species increasingly better adapted to their environment. Evidence, as they say, is overwhelming. Or is it? Imagine planet Earth began its existence a mere 10,000 years ago, with all fossil records in place and carbon-14 well into decaying. From there on, however, evolution proceeded as scientists tell us. How’d you prove this story wrong? You can’t. I know it hurts. But hang on there, band aid follows below. You can’t prove this...