Paleontologists have formally described Spinosaurus mirabilis, a new species distinguished by a scimitar-shaped bony cranial ...

The unlucky fossil bird, preserved with over 800 tiny rocks in its throat (visible as the gray mass next to the left of its neck bones). A fossil only tells part of the story. When an animal’s body is ...

Rare 160-million-year-old sea spider fossils from Southern France look nearly identical to living species, revealing a body ...

A river hunt for ancient sea fossils takes a strange turn when the group starts finding unusual lightweight rocks that don’t behave like normal stone. Some show early signs of crystal formation—almost ...

A team of MIT geochemists has unearthed new evidence in very old rocks suggesting that some of the first animals on Earth were likely ancestors of the modern sea sponge. The newly identified chemical ...

Hidden beneath farmland in the central tablelands of New South Wales lies one of Australia's most extraordinary fossil sites—McGraths Flat. It dates back between 11 million and 16 million years into ...

Sixty-five miles southwest of Chicago, a small hill that looks like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie breaks up the flat, monotone landscape. Consisting of shale, sandstone and rocks from an old coal ...

The fossil turned out to be a hatchling of a crocodile-like creature, and it suggests, according to a new study, that early ...

How ancient bryozoans may have looked. (Zhifei Zhang) The Cambrian explosion was one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of evolution. Around 540 million years ago, a sudden, astonishing ...

A puzzling wrinkled rock formation in Morocco has led scientists to rethink where ancient microbes could live. Instead of shallow, sunlit waters, these microbes may have thrived deep in the ocean, ...