An artificial island of sand dredged from Indonesia's seafloor has accidentally revealed evidence of a long-lost sunken world, inhabited by early humans. Scattered across the newly created island, ...

Scientists have digitally reconstructed the face of a 1.5-million-year-old Homo erectus fossil from Ethiopia, uncovering an unexpectedly primitive appearance. While its braincase fits with classic ...

In 1859, Charles Darwin coined the term “living fossils” to describe organisms that show little species diversity or physical differences from their ancestors in the fossil record. In a new study, ...

For the more than 242 million years that lizards and snakes appear in the fossil record, they show up mostly as pieces of lizard jaws and snake vertebrae. Exactly why these parts survive as fossils ...

A "provocative" new piece in Nature has proposed a whole new group of ancient humans – cousins of the Denisovans and Neanderthals – that once lived alongside Homo sapiens in eastern Asia more than 100 ...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? A jawbone fossil from a previously unknown hominin was finally identified as ...

Anatomists will tell you that every corpse tells a story, and the same is true of fossils. Long dead, animals can reveal strange clues as the passage of time compresses them into an imprint of a life.

Jessica M. Theodor receives funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. She is a former president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Kenshu Shimada is chair ...

The global fossil record of squamates, which includes lizards, mosasaurs, snakes, and amphisbaenians (A) is overwhelmingly incomplete, with most fossil species containing less than 20% of the totality ...