If you went back to visit your earliest known primate ancestors, you’d find them in the trees. New fossil evidence shows Purgatorius, a small, squirrel-like insect and fruit-eating mammal, was a tree-dweller. Paleontologists analyzed 65 million-year-old fossil ankle bones found in Northeastern Montana to clear up questions about the habitat of Purgatorius, which started kicking […]
Just look at that little guy. Doesn’t he look like he’d give Bill Murray a hard time in a prehistoric Caddyshack prequel? A well-preserved Mesozoic fossil from Madagascar and detailed analysis has given scientists a new perspective on the cute varmint, Vintana sertichi. Vintana, a member of an extinct group of mammals, gondwanatherians, didn’t fit […]
Scientists have revealed what they believe to be the first dinosaur ever discovered to hunt in the water, Spinosaurus aegyptiacus. Spinosaurus is not only the first semi-aquatic dinosaur, at 50 feet long it’s the largest predatory dinosaur ever found, at least least nine feet longer than the largest Tyrannosaurus Rex specimen. Scientist believe the great Cretaceous-era predator haunted lush […]
I like to imagine Hallucigenia, a tiny, um, thing-like prehistoric animal that scientists first found baffling fossils of in the 1970s, singing a jaunty personalized version of “We’re a Couple of Misfits” from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer as it went about its underwater day 505 million years ago during the Cambrian Explosion. Why am I […]
The scaly, green, slavering, purely reptilian dinosaur had a good run. Like Pluto as a planet, it’s being replaced by a new scientific understanding, and we just might have to admit that our image of dinosaurs as scaly monsters, as metal as it was, was wrong. Recent scientific findings from Russia suggest that it’s […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9ms04cDH50 I’ve never understood the phobia about spiders. I know people who live in mortal fear of them, but to me they’re just friendly little visitors to my home, being neighborly and eating the annoying bugs and flies. So, depending on how you come down on spiders, this video either comes with an enthusiastic encouragement […]
I guess everything is bigger, stranger and scarier in Australia. Australian scientists have found the world’s oldest fossilized sperm in a fossil dug up in Northern Queensland. It’s very well preserved for being 17 million years old and, relative to the size of the animal that produced it, pretty darned impressive. The sperm is only […]