Paleontology

Earth

Oldest feathered dino shows its colors

Analysis of a fossil suggests plumage first evolved for display, not flight.

Paleontology

Reverbs of bat echolocation studies

Ancient bat may well have used sound waves to sense the world, Sid Perkins reports in the latest Deleted Scenes blog.

Earth

Dinosaurs, in living color

Researchers find microscopic structures in some fossils that may have held pigments.

Earth

Footprints could push back tetrapod origins

Newly discovered trackways much older than previous evidence for sea-to-land transition.

Life

Groovy teeth suggest dinosaur was venomous

Fossils show depression in upper jaw that held venom-producing glands.

Paleontology

New fossil helps solidify dino origins

The dog-sized creature bolsters the notion that early dinosaurs first appeared in what is now South America.

Paleontology

Major eruption cooled the climate but went unnoticed

Ice-core records suggest that a major 1809 eruption cooled Earth even before the Tambora eruption and ‘the year without a summer’.

Paleontology

Small ancestor of giant sauropods unearthed

Fossils suggest that the bipedal dinosaur occasionally walked on all fours and could open its mouth wide to gather foliage.

Paleontology

Pollination in the pre-flower-power era

Scorpionflies with long-reaching mouthparts may have helped plants procreate long before blossoms evolved.

Paleontology

Fungi thrived during mass extinction

Fossil analyses hint that several species thrived during the world’s largest mass extinction.

Paleontology

Parasite may have felled a mighty T. rex

An infection known to afflict modern birds may have led to starvation in several dinosaurs.

Paleontology

Fish death, mammal extinction and tiny dino footprints

Paleontologists in Bristol, England, at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology report on fish fossils in Wyoming, the loss of Australia’s megafauna and the smallest dinosaur tracks.