A rare, half-billion-year-old fossil gives us a clue to how a bizarre marine invertebrate can possibly be related to humans. In a study published on July 6 in the journal Nature Communications, Harvard University researchers identified a prehistoric specimen in a ...

In late November 1974, the world of archeology changed when scientists discovered Lucy (a nod to a famous Beatles track played over and over at the dig site), a 40-percent complete fossil of a young female Australopithecus afarensis in Ethiopia. ...

Today, elephants roam the savannas of Africa and rainforests in Asia, but elephant ancestors once lived in Europe and North America before going extinct like the region’s other ancient megafauna. Scientists and a team of volunteers recently uncovered a prehistoric ...

The waters of the 360-million-year-old subcontinent Gondwana were a dangerous place for a swim. A killer, bony fish the length of an adult California sea lion stalked freshwater rivers as a top predator. It was massive—as a new discovery reveals, ...

As early as 23 million years ago, giant mastodons roamed the Earth. These elephant ancestors were typically shorter than their modern day descendants, but were more dense and also bore signature tusks. These gigantic mammals were also hunted by the ...

About 246 million years ago, a marine reptile roughly the length of a humpback whale patrolled the seas over present-day Nevada. This ichthyosaur wasn’t just remarkable because of its massive size, according to scientists who recently analyzed a partial skeleton ...

A mysterious fossil previously thought to be a four-legged snake is actually an ancient lizard, a new analysis suggests.  Researchers first identified the roughly 120 million-year-old specimen from Brazil as a snake in 2015, based on its skull and other ...

A fossilized skull discovered in Ethiopia in the 1970s should be considered an entirely new species of human, scientists proposed this week in an effort to shed light on the very murky question of what to call our ancient ancestors.  ...

The story of all land animals begins with a squat-limbed, long-bodied swamp fish. Sometime in the steamy mid-Devonian, a family of those fish followed plants and bugs onto land and became the first tetrapods, or four-legged vertebrates. But the fossil ...

Kate Evans for Undark Kate Evans is a freelance science journalist and writer based in Raglan, New Zealand. Follow her on Twitter @kate_g_evans. This article was originally published on Undark. One of New Zealand’s most spectacular fossil sites originated 23.2 ...