Paris – One day 370 million years ago, a tiny larva came to a sticky end when it plunged into a shrimp-infested swamp and drowned.Unearthed in modern-day Belgium, the humble bug now looks set to plug a giant gap in the fossil record. Named Strudiella devonica, the eight-millimetre invertebrate – while in far from mint condition […]

An international research team, with Spanish participation, has discovered a new species of mollusc,Polyconites hadriani, in various parts of the Iberian Peninsula. The researchers say this species, which is the oldest in its genus, adapted to the acidification of the oceans that took place while it was in existence. This process could now determine the […]

A mysterious cycle of booms and busts in marine biodiversity over the past 500 million years could be tied to a periodic uplifting of the world’s continents, scientists report in the March issue of The Journal of Geology. The researchers discovered periodic increases in the amount of the isotope strontium-87 found in marine fossils. The timing […]

A Triceratops may have been the last dinosaur standing, according to a new study that determined a fossil from Montana’s Hell Creek Formation is “the youngest dinosaur known to science.” The Triceratops, described in the latest Royal Society Biology Letters, dates to 65 million years ago, the critical period of time associated with the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) extinction event that […]

A study by researchers at the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum sheds new light on a previously unclassifiable 500 million-year-old squid-like carnivore known as Nectocaris pteryx. “We think that this extremely rare creature is an early ancestor of squids, octopuses, and other cephalopods”, says Martin Smith of U of T’s Department of Ecology […]

The powerful magnitude-8.6 earthquake that shook Sumatra on April 11, 2012, was a seismic standout for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was larger than scientists thought an earthquake of its type — an intraplate strike-slip quake — could ever be. Now, as Caltech researchers report on their findings from the […]

Tyrannosaurus rex was still making a nice living, paleontologists report, but some other dinosaurs declined in numbers long before the asteroid hit 65.5 million years ago . In the journal Nature Communications, a team led by Stephen Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, look at seven major dinosaur sub-groups, ranging from T. […]

Scientists from Russia’s Chechen State University claim to have unearthed at least 40 of the world’s largest “dinosaur eggs,” measuring up to 3 ft. (1 m) in diameter and dating back roughly 60 million years. Apparently, while blasting through rocks to build a road in southern Russia’s turbulent Chechnya republic, workers found a cluster of […]