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A team of international scientists have discovered 240-million-year-old fossils from the Triassic period in China that one scientist described as a "long and snake-like, mythical Chinese dragon." The 16-foot-long aquatic reptile, called Dinocephalosaurus orientalis, has 32 separate neck vertebrae – an extremely long neck, according to the National Museums of Scotland, which announced the news on Friday. The new fossil has a snake-like appearance and flippers and was found in the Guizhou Province of southern China. Dinocephalosaurus orientalis was first identified in 2003 when its skull was found, but this more complete fossil discovery has "allowed scientists to depict the...

Erik Gulbranson, a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, trudges up a steep ridge overlooking his field camp of mountain tents and pyramid-shaped Scott tents in Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys. A brief hike nearly to the top of a shorter ridge ends at the quarry, where picks and hammers have chopped out a ledge of sorts in the slate-grey hillside. 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...

Life reconstruction of herbivorous dinosaurs based on 220-million-year-old fossil footprints from Ipswich, Queensland, Australia. Credit: Anthony Romilio ========================================================================================= “Raptor-like” dinosaur discovered in an Australian mine, actually uncovered as a timid vegetarian. 50-year-old findings of the Triassic period’s “largest meat-eating dinosaur” reanalyzed as the long-necked herbivore Prosauropod. Fossil footprints found in an Australian coal mine around 50 years ago have long been thought to be that of a large ‘raptor-like’ predatory dinosaur, but scientists have in fact discovered they were instead left by a timid long-necked herbivore. University of Queensland paleontologist Dr. Anthony Romilio recently led an international team to re-analyze...

3D reconstruction of Triamyxa coprolithica. (Qvarnström et al.) =============================================================================== Way back in the Late Triassic period, in what is now modern day Poland, a long-snouted dinosaur ate a big meal of green algae and then took a poop. It was a day like any other for the animal, but for us, roughly 230-million years later, those very fossilized feces have revealed an entire family of undigested beetles. The insects are the first to be described from fossilized feces and they are unlike anything we've discovered in amber before. Not only are these insects much more ancient, their legs and antennae...

Several complete skeletons hint at sudden, mass extinctionResearchers from the Whiteside Museum of Natural History in Seymour are unraveling an ancient mystery. "This is life," said Coleton Caldwell, assistant director of the museum. "The first time life is living on land, solely on land, and it's still trying to figure things out, you know? What works, what doesn't work? So it's just really, really, really unique." Working southwest of Wichita Falls, near the shore of Lake Kemp in Baylor County, the researchers have uncovered the skeletal remains of seven dimetrodons. The mammal-like finback reptiles roamed parts of North Texas 60...

A peculiar, 220-million-year-old species of burrowing reptiles that evaded scientists has been found, fossilized. A team of National Park Service interns are credited with its discovery. Hidden in a once-vibrant part of Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park, the burgeoning paleontologists unearthed fossils of the Skybalonyx skapter, an "anteater-like reptile" that probably predates dinosaurs, according to findings published this month in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. It's a new species of a reptile previously thought to only live in trees. The unusual Skybalonyx skapter belongs to the group Drepanosaur, often considered the ugly duckling of reptiles (perhaps partly because they bore...

...scientists at Harvard University and the University of Washington report evidence of a hibernation-like state in an animal that lived in Antarctica during the Early Triassic, some 250 million years ago. The creature, a member of the genus Lystrosaurus, was a distant relative of mammals. Lystrosaurus were common during the Permian and Triassic periods and are characterized by their turtle-like beaks and ever-growing tusks... Lystrosaurus arose before Earth's largest mass extinction at the end of the Permian Period... and spread across swathes of Earth's then-single continent, Pangea, which included what is now Antarctica... Today, paleontologists find Lystrosaurus fossils in India,...

The rise of mollusks across the globe was a harbinger of doom roughly 250 million years ago, ushering in the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history, research now reveals.

Just like the modern platypus, this 250-million-year-old, Triassic-age marine reptile likely used its cartilaginous bill to discover and seize its next meal, a new study finds. "This animal had unusually small eyes for the body, only rivaled by some living animals that rely on senses other than vision and feed in the dusk or darkness — for example some shrews, badgers and the duck-billed platypus," said study lead researcher Ryosuke Motani, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis. "So, it most likely used tactile senses [with its] platypus-like bill to detect prey in the dusk or darkness." ..." Previously,...

Some 252 million years ago, Earth almost died. In the oceans, 96 percent of all species became extinct. It’s harder to determine how many terrestrial species vanished, but the loss was comparable. This mass extinction, at the end of the Permian Period, was the worst in the planet’s history, and it happened over a few thousand years at most — the blink of a geological eye. On Thursday, a team of scientists offered a detailed accounting of how marine life was wiped out during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Global warming robbed the oceans of oxygen, they say, putting many species...

Imagine if you crossed a rhino with a giant turtle and then supersized the result: You might get something like Lisowicia bojani, a newly discovered Triassic mammal cousin that had a body shaped like a rhinoceros, a beak like a turtle, and weighed as much as an African elephant, about 9 tons. Paleontologists say this startling creature offers a new view of the dawn of the age of the dinosaurs. "Who would have ever thought that there were giant, elephant-sized mammal cousins living alongside some of the very first dinosaurs?" marvels Stephen Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist at The University of...

It took less than 30,000 years and maybe only thousands, to kill more than 90% of sea creatures and most land species, according to the most precise study ever published about the mass extinction marking the end of the Permian Period. Earth's greatest mass extinction, also known as the "Great Dying," occurred about 252 million years ago. By some estimates, over 90% of sea creatures and most land-dwelling reptiles disappeared. Even usually resilient plants and insects suffered near annihilation... Scientists from China, the USA and Canada combined new high-resolution radiometric dating of seven closely spaced layers of volcanic material from...

Pterosaurs were giant flying reptiles that flew over the heads of the dinosaurs. Soaring on skin wings supported by a single huge finger, they were the largest animals ever to take wing. Originating in the Late Triassic epoch (around 215 million years ago), they thrived to the end of the Cretaceous period (66 million years ago).Triassic pterosaurs are extraordinarily rare and are known exclusively from marine deposits in the Alps (Italy, Austria and Switzerland), except for Arcticodactylus cromptonellus from fluvial deposits in Greenland.The new Triassic pterosaur is from the Saints & Sinners Quarry near Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.Named Caelestiventus...

Named Eorhynchochelys sinensis, the newly-discovered turtle lived approximately 228 million years ago (Triassic period) in what is now southwestern China.“This creature was over 6 feet long, it had a strange disc-like body and a long tail, and the anterior part of its jaws developed into this strange beak. It probably lived in shallow water and dug in the mud for food,” said Dr. Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at Field Museum.“Eorhynchochelys sinensis isn’t the only kind of early turtle that paleontologists have discovered — there is another early turtle with a partial shell but no beak. Until now, it’s been unclear...

Did a Planetary Society citizen scientist help find one of Earth’s biggest impact craters? About 66 million years ago, a 10-kilometer-wide hunk of rock smashed into Earth near what is now Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula.The impact created a global dust cloud that snuffed out the sunlight, leading to the demise of 80 percent of Earth's plants and animals—including most of the dinosaurs. A 200-kilometer-wide crater buried near the city of Chicxulub is all that's left. It's ground zero for one of the world's most notable extinction events.But throughout Earth's history, there have actually been five major extinction events. The largest of...

Over the course of the past 200 million years, our planet has experienced four major geological periods (the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous and Cenozoic) and one major ice age (the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation), all of which had a drastic impact on plant and animal life, as well as effecting the course of species evolution. For decades, geologists have also understood that these changes are due in part to gradual shifts in the Earth’s orbit, which are caused by Venus and Jupiter, and repeat regularly every 405,000 years. But it was not until recently that a team of geologists and Earth scientists...

Ancient “Monster” Insect Found Fly in amber: This ancient "unicorn" fly that lived 100 million years ago in Burma has a "horn" in the center of its forehead, capped with three small eyes. Courtesy of George Poinar Researchers have announced the discovery of a new, real-world “monster” — what they are calling a “unicorn” fly — that lived about 100 million years ago and is being described as a new family, genus and species of fly never before observed. A single, incredibly well-preserved specimen of the tiny but scary-looking fly was preserved for eternity in Burmese amber. It had...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A meteor's roaring crash into Antarctica -- larger and earlier than the impact that killed the dinosaurs -- caused the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history and likely spawned the Australian continent, scientists said. Ohio State University scientists said the 483-kilometer-wide (300-mile-wide) crater is now hidden more than 1.6 kilometers (one mile) beneath the East Antarctic Ice Sheet. "Gravity measurements that reveal its existence suggest that it could date back about 250 million years -- the time of the Permian-Triassic extinction, when almost all animal life on Earth died out," the university said in a statement Thursday....

New research has revealed why it took more than 30 million years for large Triassic dinosaurs to populate the tropics after they first appeared on Earth, ending a mystery that has kept researchers baffled for decades. Using new geological evidence culled from Ghost Ranch, N.M., researchers from the University of Southampton in the U.K. have found that an extremely unpredictable hot and arid climate due to elevated carbon dioxide levels (four to six times of what they are today) kept large herbivorous dinos at bay until after 200 million years ago.

Around 250 million years ago, a huge volcanic eruption triggered a deadly series of events that wiped out 95% of all species on Earth. Scientists have been piecing together the story of what happened. Our planet has a troubled and turbulent past: five catastrophic natural events have caused mass extinctions of life on Earth. Perhaps the most famous one is the asteroid impact that caused the demise of the dinosaurs. But the most extensive extinction event occurred even before dinosaurs were around. In the Permian era, about 250 million years ago, a destructive volcanic eruption radically altered conditions on Earth...