Fossils

The unearthing of 2,000-year-old boards has given historians a new insight into an ancient game akin to chess that was played much earlier, by everyone from royals to commoners in society – before it seemingly vanished from society.

The ancient marine creature Spriggina floundersi didn’t have hands. It barely had a head. And yet we now know it also had a dominant side of its body – an early sign of the development of behavioral handedness.

Our distant relatives, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “hobbits,” have been credited with two advanced skills: hunting small elephant relatives and controlling fire. A new study now challenges both of these famous ideas.

New research on a pterosaur fossil reveals secrets of the creature’s life, including microscopic inner structures of its bones and traces of its biology and diet. The findings show that molecular evidence can survive for more than 100 million years.

The Tyrannosaurus rex (T. rex) is known for its bone-crushing bite, gigantic size, and famously small forelimbs. But why these large, carnivorous theropod dinosaurs evolved tiny arms has long been debated.

A new study suggests that genes from the ancient human species, Homo erectus, may have been passed on to living people in the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and across south-east Asia.

Sometimes, the most important paleontological discoveries may come from the most disgusting materials. A fossilized vomit sample dating back nearly 300 million years revealed how an ancient mammal gorged on all manner of prey.

A 26-ft deep excavation in Indonesia has revealed that humans and a hominin species that pre-dates humans used the same cave. The enticing possibility even exists that both species overlapped, sharing the space at the same time.

Scientists have sequenced RNA from a nearly 40,000-year-old woolly mammoth leg, the oldest ancient RNA ever recovered. These fragile molecules could reveal which genes were active in the animal’s final hours.

The extent of an incredible dinosaur highway has been revealed in Bolivia. More than 16,000 footprints, along with tail impressions, have been fully documented – and the scale of theropod activity alone is unlike anything that's been seen before.

Bears look like textbook mammals, but hidden in their evolutionary history are two dramatic departures from the rules of growth and adaptation. Scientists have now unlocked when, and how, ancient bears broke the rules and hacked nature out of need.

Using advanced chemistry and AI, a team of Carnegie researchers uncovered new chemical traces of Earth's earliest life in 3.3‑billion‑year‑old rocks, and evidence that oxygen‑producing photosynthesis began over 800 million years earlier than thought.