For nearly 30 million years, a 2,000-pound beast known as the entelodont ruled a sweeping empire from Mongolia to what is now ...

The first four-legged vertebrates did not grow up like tadpoles after all. That idea has shaped the story of life on land for ...

Researchers document a cluster of ancient Arctic ground squirrel faecal pellets preserved in permafrost at Hunker Creek, Yukon, in August 2022. These coprolites contain remarkably intact ancient DNA, ...

Ancient animal history is extremely difficult to reconstruct, for a number of reasons. Some of the earliest creatures in existence were soft-bodied and microscopic, leaving behind very little evidence ...

The growth and lifespan of Parvancorina minchami, small anchor-shaped animals that lived on the seafloor about 550 million years ago, resemble that of current marine invertebrates like golden shrimp ...

Up to 700,000 years ago, ground squirrels in modern-day Canada collected tons of helpful genetic information on their bygone ...

In a dry riverbed in Brazil, in a dense forest near the Amazon, a team of paleontologists found a fossilized jawbone from an ancient animal. Over the course of their fieldwork, they found eight ...

Why do some ancient animals become fossils while others disappear without a trace? A new study from the University of Lausanne, published in Nature Communications, reveals that part of the answer lies ...

Because this fingerprint turned up in both Siberia and South China, the team interprets it as evidence of a worldwide shift ...

A groundbreaking new study from Bar-Ilan University shows that one of sleep's core functions originated hundreds of millions of years ago in jellyfish and sea anemones, among the earliest creatures ...

A bizarre crocodile relative from the age of dinosaurs is rewriting what scientists thought they knew about ancient reptiles. This poodle-sized creature, called Sonselasuchus cedrus, appears to have ...