29 December 2022
New fossil discoveries show predatory marine reptiles from 200 million years ago may have been bigger than today’s blue whales – and that they evolved astonishingly rapidly
7 December 2022
DNA bound to mineral particles in ancient sediment reveals that north Greenland once had spruce forests populated by hares, reindeer and even mastodons
28 March 2022
The Cambrian animals preserved at the Chengjiang fossil site in China lived in a shallow sea close to a river delta – a changeable environment that might have driven rapid evolution
9 March 2022
A large species of gharial, an animal closely related to crocodiles, roamed China 3000 years ago, but was probably driven extinct by humans
4 March 2022
The Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago saw a huge variety of animals evolve – and also led to carbon being buried in the seabed and ultimately carried into the planet’s mantle
28 October 2021
Researchers who reanalysed ancient fossils say they come from a new group of hominins living in Africa around 600,000 years ago, and so deserve a new species name
28 July 2021
The preserved remains of sponges found in Canada suggest that animals may have originated 350 million years earlier than we thought
22 July 2021
The wings of hatchling pterosaurs were ideally suited to powered flight, suggesting they took to the air almost immediately after emerging – unlike most modern birds
4 May 2021
The preserved remains of an ancient squid-like animal suggest it was eating the moulted skin of a crustacean when it was itself partially eaten by a larger animal like a shark
17 February 2021
For the first time, DNA more than a million years old has been obtained from ancient animal remains – and it drastically alters the story of mammoth evolution
