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DENVER — Life on Earth got into the shell game more than 200 million years earlier than previously thought. Fossilized eukaryotes — complex life-forms that include animals and plants — discovered in Canada are decked out in armorlike layers of mineral plates, paleobiologist Phoebe Cohen said September 27 at the Geological Society of America’s annual meeting. At about 809 million years old, the find is the oldest evidence of organisms controlling the formation of minerals, a process called biomineralization. ********* The mineral plates themselves are odd. Most modern microbes make shells out of calcium carbonate, but the ancient shells are...

The researchers trace the fossil record, which illustrates a timeline placing multiple species overlapping in time and geographic space. Their insights spur further questions about how these early human ancestors were related and shared resources... The 1974 discovery of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived from 3.8 to 2.9 million years ago, was a major milestone in paleoanthropology that pushed the record of hominins earlier than 3 million years ago and demonstrated the antiquity of human-like walking. Scientists have long argued that there was only one pre-human species at any given time before 3 million years ago that gave rise to another...

For the past decade, a fossil human relative about the size of a toddler has loomed large in the story of our evolutionary history. This mysterious creature—found on the Indonesian island of Flores—has sparked a heated debate about its origins, including questions over its classification as a unique species. But now, a scattering of teeth and bone may at last unlock the mystery of the “hobbits,” also known as Homo floresiensis. The 700,000-year-old human remains are the first found outside Liang Bua cave, the site on Flores that yielded the original hobbit fossils. The much older samples show intriguing similarities...

Scientists digging in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores years ago found a tiny humanlike skull, then a pelvis, jaw and other bones, all between 60,000 and 100,000 years old. The fossils, the scientists concluded, belonged to individuals who stood just three feet tall — an unknown species, related to modern humans, that they called Homo floresiensis or, more casually, the hobbits. On Wednesday, researchers reported that they had discovered still older remains on the island, including teeth, a piece of a jaw and 149 stone tools dating back 700,000 years. The finding suggests that the...

Previous analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neandertals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neandertal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neandertals. Neandertals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes...

The species would have looked similar to modern rats but ranged in size from about 1.5 kilograms to five kilograms. Researcher Julien Louys said the creatures were probably herbivores and became extinct suddenly about 1,000 years ago. He said they were the largest known rats to have ever existed and acknowledged some people thought they sounded terrifying. "Most people seem to think that," Dr Louys said. "But I think they would have been, well not cute, but certainly they would have been fascinating to see them in the flesh." He said it appeared the rats were a popular meal for...

You may think your dog has an irrational hatred of cats, but their instinct to chase felines out of their territory might be more reasonable than you think. Fossils have revealed the two species have a rocky past after the introduction of cats to the Americas had a devastating effect on the continent's species of wild dogs. In fact, it is thought that competition from cats caused up to 40 species of dog to become extinct in the region millions of years ago.

The cupboards of the Natural History Museum in London hold spectacular dinosaur fossils, from 10-centimeter, serrated Tyrannosaurus rex teeth to a 4-meter-long hadrosaur tail. Now, researchers are reporting another spectacular find, buried in eight nondescript fossils from the same collection: what appear to be ancient red blood cells and fibers of ancient protein. Using new methods to peer deep inside fossils, the study in this week’s issue of Nature Communications backs up previous, controversial reports of such structures in dinosaur bones. It also suggests that soft tissue preservation may be more common than anyone had guessed. “It’s encouraging,” especially because...

A fossilized skull and teeth from a newly described species of beaver that lived 28 million years ago have been unearthed in eastern Oregon. The fossils worked their way out of the soil within a mile of the visitor center at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, said the monument's paleontologist, Joshua Samuels. The find is significant, he said, because unlike the other species of ancient beavers found at the monument, this one appears related to the modern beaver, a symbol of Oregon found on the state flag. The others all went extinct. The species is named Microtheriomys brevirhinus....

Sometime about 220 million years ago, a meandering stream flowed here and plants grew along its banks. Something, as yet unknown, caused sediment to flood the area rapidly, which helped preserve the plants. Gulbranson splits open a grey slab of siltstone in the quarry to reveal amazingly well-preserved Triassic plant fossils, as if the leaves and stems had been freshly pressed into the rock only yesterday. "It's a mixture of plants that don't exist anymore," he says, "but we have some plants in these fossil ecosystems that we might know today, like ginkgo." On the one end are fossils from...

Around 5,000 years ago, the island of Madagascar would have resembled a Sci-Fi novel. Strange, prickly forests, gorilla-sized lemurs, pygmy hippopotamuses, horned crocodile and elephant birds whose eggs were 180 times the size of what you'd find in your fridge today, all called the African island home -- that was until the humans arrived.

Two men discovered an ancient bison skull while scavenging near downtown Kansas City, Missouri, in mid-January. Mike Ruth and Dave Jamerson were poking around the waterways of the Missouri River, looking for artifacts, fossils, cool stuff like that, when they found what they first thought might have been a piece of driftwood, according to KCTV5. As they lifted the piece from the silt, they realized they had “something really cool,” as Ruth told the outlet. “I immediately thought bison,” Jamerson commented. The fossil was covered in silt and zebra mussels as they unearthed it, but came out of the dirt...

Around 120 million years ago, four-winged dinosaurs roughly the size of crows called Microraptors stalked the ancient woodlands of what is now China.While researchers have studied several Microraptor specimens, there's still a lot we don't know about these feathered bird-like creatures – including what and how they ate.Now an incredibly rare fossil has revealed the preserved final meal of one individual: and unexpectedly, it was a mammal...The first Microraptor fossil was found in Liaoning, China, in 2000. There are three known species, which lived in the early Cretacious period, and the fossil in question belongs to Microraptor zhaoianus...The Microraptors were...

Lizard Skull Fossil Closeup One of the Thalassotitan skulls. (University of Bath) The discovery of incredible fossils of a giant marine lizard reveals how this ancient extinct beast would have ruled the sea 66 million years ago. The beast is a newly discovered species of mosasaur, giant marine reptiles that hunted the oceans during the Late Cretaceous. It's called Thalassotitan atrox, and wear on its teeth along with other remains found at its excavation site suggest that this intimidating animal was no gentle giant – but feasted on difficult prey such as sea turtles, plesiosaurs, and other mosasaurs. Other mosasaurs...

"Little Foot" one of several well-known fossils found at Sterkfontein caves in South Africa's Cradle of Humankind. The fossils of our earliest ancestors found in South Africa are a million years older than previously thought, meaning they walked the Earth around the same time as their East African relatives like the famous "Lucy", according to new research. The Sterkfontein caves at the Cradle of Humankind world heritage site southwest of Johannesburg have yielded more Australopithecus fossils than any other site in the world. Among them was "Mrs Ples", the most complete skull of an Australopithecus africanus found in South...

Scientists have finally rediscovered a lost fossil site in Brazil, after the researchers who originally discovered it 70 years ago were unable to retrace their steps to the remote location...The rediscovered site, which is known as Cerro Chato, is located near Brazil’s border with Uruguay in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul. Around 260 million years ago, towards the end of the Permian period (299 million to 251 million years ago) conditions at the site were ideal for trapping and preserving dead organisms. As a result, multiple rocky layers at Cerro Chato are chock-full of delicate fossils —...

Scientists have uncovered the remains of one of the largest pterosaurs on record, researchers announced in a study published Tuesday in the scientific journal Cretaceous Research. The fossils are from the largest-ever pterosaur found in South America, and one of the largest flying vertebrates in the world, according to researchers. The discovery of two separate animals was made in an outcrop in Argentina's Mendoza province and published in April. The Thanatosdrakon amaru is a new azhdarchid, a member of the pterosaur family of large, flying predators, predominantly from the Late Cretaceous Period. The name is a combination of Thanatos, the...

Spider fossil under UV light. (Olcott et al., Communications Earth and Environment, 2022) =================================================================== 21 APRIL 2022 A fossilized spider that glows under ultraviolet light has given away the secret of its exceptional 23-million-year-long existence. When researchers placed the fossil and others like it under a fluorescent microscope on a whim, they were surprised to notice the subtle outline of the arachnids suddenly pop against their background. "To our surprise they glowed, and so we got very interested in what the chemistry of these fossils was that made them glow," explains geologist Alison Olcott from the University of Kansas. Analyses...

The limb, complete with skin, is just one of a series of remarkable finds emerging from the Tanis fossil site in the US State of North Dakota. But it's not just their exquisite condition that's turning heads - it's what these ancient specimens purport to represent. The claim is the Tanis creatures were killed and entombed on the actual day a giant asteroid struck Earth. The day 66 million years ago when the reign of the dinosaurs ended and the rise of mammals began. The BBC has spent three years filming at Tanis for a show to be broadcast on...

A long-necked dinosaur that roamed present-day Montana 150 million years ago likely suffered from a respiratory infection, according to a study published in Scientific Reports on Thursday, the first evidence of a respiratory infection in dinosaurs which experts believe could have caused flu-like symptoms including coughing and fever