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Montana Troodon Fossils Reveal a Dinosaur With Troubled Feet
Troodon fossils from Montana have given researchers their most complete view yet of how the enigmatic dinosaur’s pelvis and hindlimbs developed from embryo to adult. The bones also reveal a curious pattern: possible foot pathologies appear unusually common among the animals examined. The study, published in PLOS ONE, focuses on specimens from the upper Two…
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210-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur Found in Zimbabwe Had Survived a Serious Injury or Infection
A 210-million-year-old dinosaur found in Zimbabwe carried evidence of a difficult episode in its short life. Before dying at roughly eight years old, Musango matusadonaensis had recovered from a serious injury or infection, leaving traces that researchers could still recognize in its fossilized bones. Nearly fully grown when it died, the animal now represents the…
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Giant Mammal-Like Footprints Reveal a Hidden World in Dinosaur-Era Brazil
The fossil record has long encouraged a simple picture of mammals during the age of dinosaurs: most were small, while giant reptiles dominated the landscape. Unusually large footprints from an Early Cretaceous desert in Brazil suggest that this picture may be incomplete. Researchers studying the Botucatu Formation in southern Brazil have described two large four-toed…
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Single Vertebra Reveals New Long-Necked Dinosaur in Thailand
A fossilized backbone found in northeastern Thailand has led palaeontologists to identify a previously unknown species of long-necked dinosaur. Named Uragasaurus kalasinensis, the plant-eating dinosaur lived during the Late Jurassic and belonged to Mamenchisauridae, a sauropod family known for animals with unusually long necks. It is the first member of this family to be formally…
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11-Year-Old Discovers 48-Million-Year-Old Turtle Fossil on Public Lands in Wyoming
It looked like an ordinary stone. But in the vast, wind-swept terrain of southwestern Wyoming, an 11-year-old boy paused — and changed the story of a 48-million-year-old landscape. Last fall, while exploring Bureau of Land Management (BLM) public land in the Greater Green River Basin, young fossil enthusiast Touren made a discovery that has since…
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AI App Learns to Read Dinosaur Footprints—Without Knowing Their Names
At first glance, a fossilized dinosaur footprint looks deceptively simple. Three toes. A heel mark. But for paleontologists, identifying which dinosaur made which track has long been one of the field’s most stubborn puzzles. Now, a new artificial intelligence tool is offering a fresh way forward—by learning without labels. Researchers have launched DinoTracker, a free…
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340-Million-Year-Old Sea Creatures Discovered Inside a Stone Wall in England
What began as routine countryside work turned into a window onto a vanished ocean. An Unexpected Find in the Peak District Rangers working for the National Trust have uncovered remarkably well-preserved marine fossils embedded in an ordinary dry stone wall in England’s Peak District.The fossils date back around 340 million years, to the Carboniferous period,…
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Mummified Cheetahs Found in Saudi Arabian Caves Reveal a Lost Predator Landscape
Deep beneath the desert plateaus of northern Saudi Arabia, scientists have uncovered a discovery that feels almost implausible at first glance: naturally mummified cheetahs, preserved for millennia inside dry limestone caves. The find offers a rare, almost intimate glimpse into a vanished ecosystem—one in which apex predators once thrived where today only silence remains. The…
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Europe’s Oldest Mule Found in Catalonia Rewrites the Timeline of Phoenician Influence
Early Iron Age hybrid uncovered in the Penedès region suggests equid crossbreeding knowledge reached Europe centuries earlier than believed When archaeologists opened a small Iron Age pit at Hort d’en Grimau nearly four decades ago, the discovery seemed intriguing but not extraordinary: a partially burned human skeleton, mixed with the bones of an equid. Only…