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First collected in southwestern Wyoming in a fossil site known as the Green River Formation, Eocypselus rowei lived about 50 million years ago. It was a small creature about 12 cm long (from head to tail), and weighed less than an ounce... The fossil is unusual in having exceptionally well-preserved feathers, which allowed the researchers to reconstruct the size and shape of the bird’s wings in ways not possible with bones alone. Feathers account for more than half of the bird’s total wing length... The analysis suggests that the bird was an evolutionary precursor to the group that includes today’s...

Prof Christian Sidor and his colleagues headed by Dr Linda Tsuji, also from the University of Washington, created two ‘snapshots’ of four legged-animals about 5 million years before and again about 10 million years after the Earth’s largest mass extinction (about 252 million years ago). Prior to the extinction event, for example, the pig-sized Dicynodon was a dominant plant-eating species across southern Pangea. Pangea is the name given to the landmass when all the world’s continents were joined together. Southern Pangea was made up of what is today Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India. After the mass extinction at...

Dr Moya-Sola with colleagues discovered the fossil specimen of Pierolapithecus in Spain in 2002. They estimated that the hominid lived about 11.9 million years ago, arguing that it could be the last common ancestor of modern great apes: chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas and humans... the shape of the specimen’s pelvis indicates that Pierolapithecus lived near the beginning of the great ape evolution, after the lesser apes had started to develop separately but before the great ape species began to diversify... “The ilium – the largest bone in the pelvis – of the Pierolapithecus is wider than that of Proconsul nyanzae,...