Fossil | featured news

One of the world's most famous fossil creatures, widely considered the earliest known bird, is getting a rude present on the 150th birthday of its discovery: A new analysis suggests it isn't a bird at all....

Some of the earliest Americans turn out to have been artists. A bone fragment at least 13,000 years old, with the carved image of a mammoth or mastodon, has been discovered in Florida, a new study reports. While prehistoric art depicting animals with trunks has been found in Europe, this may be the first in the Western Hemisphere, researchers report Wednesday in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Scientists say they have discovered the first fossil of a dinosaur in Angola, and that it's a new creature, heralding a research renaissance in a country slowly emerging from decades of war....

Paleontologists have found in the desert of Coahuila, a state in northern Mexico, fragments of vertebrae and long bones that could have belonged to a species of dinosaur that lived in the region 72 million years ago during the late Cretaceous period, officials said.

A team of researchers who got a first look at a foot bone from famous fossil Lucy who lived 3 million or more years ago, and concluded this ancestor was fully comfortable with life on the ground, rather than in the trees.

Triceratops has a new cousin -- one from a distant continent, that is. Scientists from South Korea, the United States and Japan just announced the discovery of a new horned dinosaur, based on an analysis of fossil evidence found in South Korea. Dubbed "Koreaceratops" after its country of origin, the new dinosaur fossil was found in 2008 in a block of rock along the Tando Basin reservoir.

As if it weren't fearsome enough already, Tyrannosaurus rex had yet another disagreeable trait, a new study claims. A Yale University paleontologist who examined a few dozen T. rex bones in a number of museum fossil ...

Paleontologists are reporting the earliest evidence to date for the emergence of dinosaurs, 250-million-year-old fossil footprints.

A utility company preparing to build a new substation in an arid canyon southeast of Los Angeles has stumbled on a trove of animal fossils dating back 1.4 million years that researchers say will fill in blanks in Southern California's history.

A shrunken brain may potentially lie inside the fossil skull of a newfound candidate for the immediate ancestor to the human lineage, researchers now reveal. This new species, dubbed Australopithecus sediba, was accidentally discovered in South Africa by the 9-year-old son of a scientist. Two members of this hominid were introduced to the world last week — a juvenile male and an adult female, who might have known each other in life and who could have met their demise by falling into the remains of the cave where they were discovered.