Paleontogly

An international team of researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom has discovered a new species of pig-footed bandicoot which has been extinct for more than half a century. Chaeropus yirratji. Image credit: Peter Schouten / Western Australian Museum. The pig-footed bandicoot (Chaeropus ecaudatus) was unique, and unlike any other …

Hanging lazily from tree branches where they barely move for hours on end, sloths hardly seem like born survivors. Yet the sloths that creep through the rainforest canopies of Central and South America are the last remaining members of a group of animals that has roamed the Earth for at …

A new species of ancient whale ancestor has been identified from a fossilized skeleton found in Peru. This illustration shows an artistic reconstruction of two individuals of Peregocetus pacificus, one standing along the rocky shore of nowadays Peru and the other preying upon sparid fish. Image credit: A. Gennari. Named …

At a site dubbed Tanis in North Dakota’s Hell Creek Formation, paleontologists have unearthed an assemblage of exquisitely-preserved fossilized organisms — fish stacked one atop another and mixed in with burned tree trunks, conifer branches, mammals, mosasaur bones, insects, the partial carcass of a Triceratops, marine microorganisms called dinoflagellates and …

A new species of mastodon that lived during the Pleistocene period has been identified from fossil found in California and Idaho. The Pacific mastodon (Mammut pacificus), holotype skull and tusks; a skull in: (A) dorsal, (B) ventral, (C) left lateral, (D) right lateral, (E) posterior, (F) distal end of left …

The world’s biggest known Tyrannosaurus rex — one of the largest and most fearsome carnivores of all time — lived about 66 million years ago (Cretaceous period) in what is now Saskatchewan, Canada. Scotty is the largest dinosaur skeleton ever found in Canada. Image credit: Amanda Kelley. Scotty was 42.7 …

Animal life exploded in diversity and form during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. An international team of paleontologists has discovered an early Cambrian fossil site in China — the Qingjiang biota — that contains a variety of specimens, more than half of which are previously undescribed. The …

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis, also known as Clovis comet hypothesis, posits that the hemisphere-wide debris field of a large, disintegrating asteroid (or comet) struck North America, South America, Europe, and western Asia approximately 12,800 years ago. This event triggered extensive biomass burning, brief impact winter, climate change, and contributed …

Paleontologists in Australia have found fossil fragments from a new genus and species of ornithopod dinosaur that walked the Earth during the Early Cretaceous epoch. Galleonosaurus dorisae. Image credit: James Kuether. The new dinosaur belongs to Ornithopoda (ornithopods), a major group of herbivorous bird-hipped dinosaurs. Dubbed Galleonosaurus dorisae, it inhabited …

Paleontologists largely agree that the Chicxulub asteroid impact, possibly coupled with intense volcanic activity in India’s Deccan Traps, wiped out non-avian dinosaurs (all dinosaurs except birds) at the end of the Cretaceous period, approximately 66 million years ago. However, there is debate about whether dinosaurs were flourishing before this, or …