Dinosaurs may not have been the slow, sunbathing reptiles researchers used to think. In fact, they may have been warm-blooded, new research suggests.The researchers studied the “growth lines” on animal bones, which are similar to the growth rings in tree trunks. During slow-growing times like during the winter, they are darker and narrower, while in fast-growing […]

A FOSSIL uncovered on a Melbourne beach belonged to a giant prehistoric bird with a five-metre wing span and serrated beak, scientists report. The 5 million-year-old lower leg bone is the first evidence the ancient sea bird once soared across Australia’s skies. A Museum Victoria palaeontologist, Erich Fitzgerald, who led analysis of the specimen, said […]

Since the end of the last ice age 21,000 years ago, our planet has seen ocean levels rise by 120 meters to reach their current levels. This increase has not been constant, rather punctuated by rapid accelerations, linked to massive outburst floods from the ice caps. The largest increase, known by paleoclimatologists as ‘Melt-Water Pulse […]

Sauropod dinosaurs could in principle have produced enough of the greenhouse gas methane to warm the climate many millions of years ago, at a time when Earth was warm and wet. That’s according to calculations reported in the May 8th issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication. The hulking sauropods, distinctive for their enormous size and […]

The U.S. government seized a rare dinosaur skeleton Friday in what observers for the Mongolian government and a dinosaur expert called an important step toward returning the skeleton to its home in Mongolia. Wooden crates holding pieces of the Tyrannosaurus bataar fossil were loaded onto a white truck at a Queens storage center shortly before […]

Nine pairs of fornicating turtle fossils have been found in Germany, frozen in time while having sex some 50 million years ago, according to a recent study published in Biology Letters. The turtle couples, discovered in Germany’s Messel Pit, are the first vertebrate fossils found in this extreme case of coitus interruptus. They apparently died mid-intercourse […]

An Argentine-Swedish research team has reported a 70-million-year-old pocket of fossilized bones and unique eggs of an enigmatic birdlike dinosaur in Patagonia. “What makes the discovery unique are the two eggs preserved near articulated bones of its hind limb. This is the first time the eggs are found in a close proximity to skeletal remains […]

Some of the steepest mountain slopes in the world got that way because of the interplay between terrain uplift associated with plate tectonics and powerful streams cutting into hillsides, leading to erosion in the form of large landslides, new research shows. The work, presented online May 27 in Nature Geoscience, shows that once the angle of […]