Wufengella bengtsoni, an extinct species of tommotiid worm that lived during the Cambrian period, resembles the ancestor of three major groups of living animals. A reconstruction of how Wufengella bengtsoni would have looked like in life. Image credit: Roberts Nicholls, Paleocreations.com. Wufengella bengtsoni lived in what is now China during …
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Scientists have described a new species of the flowering plant genus Thismia from a forest in the Mantiqueira mountains in southeast Brazil. Thismia mantiqueirensis, habit in litter, individuals in blooming and in bud. Image credit: E. Muscat. Thismia is a genus of small, ephemeral herbaceous plants in the family Burmanniaceae. …
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The new fossil from the Cretaceous of Myanmar preserves large compound eyes, delicate mouthparts, and even gills. Cretapsara athanata, a modern-looking eubrachyuran crab in Burmese amber. Image credit: Luque et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj5689. True crabs (members of the infraorder Brachyura) are an iconic group of crustaceans whose remarkable diversity of …
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A new genus and species of mixopterid eurypterid (sea scorpion) has been identified from several fossil specimens found in the Xiushan Formation, China. Life reconstruction of Terropterus xiushanensis. Image credit: Dinghua Yang. Terropterus xiushanensis lived approximately 435 million years ago during the Llandovery epoch of the Silurian period. The ancient …
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Eograminis balticus, a new species of grass found in a piece of 40-50-million-year-old amber, represents the first definite grass to be described from Baltic amber as well as the first fossil member of Arundinoideae, a subfamily of the widespread Poaceae family that includes cereal grasses, bamboos and many species found …
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A new genus and species of palaeoscolecid worm has been identified from two specimens found in the Burgess Shale-type deposits in Utah, the United States. Arrakiscolex aasei. Image credit: University of Missouri. Palaeoscolecida is a group of extinct ecdysozoan worms that existed from the Ealy Cambrian to the Late Silurian …
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Paleontologists have described a new species of kiwi that lived during the mid-Pleistocene period on the North Island of New Zealand. The little spotted kiwi (Apteryx owenii). Artwork by John Gerrard Keulemans, 1870s. “Kiwi are an enigmatic and threatened group of birds, unique to New Zealand, with six living species …
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A nearly complete skeleton of a tapejarid pterosaur that lived during the Cretaceous period was intercepted during a police raid at Santos Harbour in the Brazilian state of São Paulo and confiscated together with several other exceptionally well-preserved fossils. Living interpretative reconstruction of Tupandactylus navigans. Image credit: Beccari et al., …
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The new specimen from the Upper Cretaceous Xiaguan Formation in the Chinese province of Henan is one of the few known fossilized turtle eggs containing an embryo with anatomical details. An artist’s impression of baby nanhsiungchelyid turtles. Image credit: Masato Hattori. “Fossilized turtles from the Mesozoic are known from a …
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Until now, the first fossil evidence of land plants was from the Devonian period (420 million years ago). However, molecular evidence suggests an earlier origin in the Cambrian period. In a new paper in the journal Science, paleontologists described an assemblage of spore-like microfossils from Early Ordivician (480 million years …
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