paleontology

Sure would've hated to see one of these things when it was living and it ate creatures it's own size? Wonder what else they'll discover in time. Bus-Size Sea Monster Found, Took On Prey Its Own Size By Brian Handwerk

More than 200 million years ago, a now-rocky section of southwestern Kyrgyzstan was a freshwater lake, ringed with horsetails and conifers — and full of baby sharks. Those are the findings of a painstaking paleontological search that turned up tiny shark teeth just a millimeter long, along with...

At a time when dinosaurs ruled the land, mosasaurs, a type of swimming reptile related to modern Komodo dragons, came to dominate the seas. Within the span of roughly 27 million years, these predators transformed from an animal with limited swimming ability and limbs still meant for walking into...

Adult tyrannosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex may have wielded the strength and size to kill large prey, but it turns out youngsters may had to have been more careful predators, using quickness and agility rather than raw power, scientists find. An international team of scientists investigated...

More evidence to add to my April 28th article, entitled: The Human Specie is Hundreds of Millions of Years Old! The 290 to 248 million years old New Mexico Footprints In 1987, paleontologist Jerry MacDonald discovered a wide variety of fossilized tracks from several different species of...

Ancient images that creationists claim are evidence of humans living alongside dinosaurs are at best just smeared pictures, scientists find. At the site of Kachina Bridge in Utah — an immense sandstone formation resembling an arch more than 200 feet (60 meters) high and wide that was formed by...

Birds are believed to be descended from dinosaurs, but some significant changes must have happened as they evolved from their ancestors. A new study involving baby chicks may help clear up a mystery of how one of those changes occurred -- how birds got their wing "fingers." All four-limbed...

An arched fossilized foot bone found in Ethiopia shows that human ancestors walked upright 3.2 million years ago and were no longer tree dwellers, said a study Thursday in the journal Science. The bone belongs to a cohort of the famed hominid Lucy, whose species Australopithecus afarensis...

A new look at a 95-million-year-old fossilized snake reveals two tiny leg bones attached to the slithery creature's pelvis. A three-dimensional reconstruction of the bones could help researchers understand how snakes evolved to lose their legs. The fossil, found in Lebanon, is from an era when...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Fossilized tracks from two newly discovered prehistoric birds have been found in Alaska's Denali National Park, according to findings released by an expert in Arctic paleontology. The previously unknown birds were among a wide variety of birds that left fossilized tracks in...

An enormous horned dinosaur, weighing as much as an African elephant with a skull extending about 8 feet (2.4 meters), was recently discovered by a paleontologist - within the pages of a scientific journal article. The dinosaur, dubbed Titanoceratops ouranos, lived in the American southwest...

Researchers in China have unearthed a miniature single-clawed dinosaur that was likely an early relative of the ferocious T. Rex and is the only such creature known to have just one finger. The newly named species of theropod, Linhenykus monodactylus, would have been about a meter (three feet)...

Paleontologists said Thursday they discovered the 85-million-year-old fossil of a previously unknown squid species from the Cretaceous era in the high jungle region of northeastern Peru. "It is a new species of squid, totally new, that has not been seen in other parts of the world,"...

HOUSTON - The scene at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences Friday (Jan. 14) was a model enthusiast's dream. Working in front of a crowd of visitors, a museum crew pieced together a fossil replica of an ancient flying reptile with a 36-foot wingspan. That's just a few feet shy of the length of...

A small predator that hunted in South America 230 million years ago represents one of the earliest-known dinosaurs and foreshadowed later meat-eating beasts like Tyrannosaurus rex, according to scientists from Argentina and the United States. In findings published on Friday in the journal...

What may be the earliest known relative of T. rex and all meat-eating dinosaurs has been discovered. The dog-sized mini-predator would've made its future relatives proud as it fed on small dinosaurs and the young of other reptiles, and is now shaking up what scientists had previously learned...

The fossil of a never-before seen species of dinosaur that could have been among the first to roam the planet 230 million years ago has been unearthed in Argentina, a study said Thursday. A fossil of the petite, two-legged Eodromaeus, which means "dawn runner," was found in Ischigualasto, a...

A giant cache of nearly 20,000 fossil reptiles, shellfish and a host of other prehistoric creatures unearthed from a mountain in China is now revealing how life recovered after the most devastating mass extinction on Earth. This research could help point out which species might be more or less...

Bird-like dinosaurs long believed to be carnivorous predators were in fact plant lovers, with the notable exception of dedicated hunters such as T. rex, US paleontologists said Monday. Lindsay Zanno and Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum in Chicago used statistical analysis to concluded that...

SALT LAKE CITY – A small, feathered raptor-like dinosaur thought to be 125 million years old has been discovered in eastern Utah, scientists announced Thursday. The Geminiraptor suarezarum was bipedal and, like other raptors, had a large head. Most of the known raptors discovered in North...