Topic
The scientific study of fossils to reconstruct ancient organisms, ecosystems, and evolutionary history across Earth's geological past.
Paul Burke's team used CT scans to name Herugavialis cairensis, a new gavial, from Egyptian fossils filed as Tomistoma since the 1920s. The reread adds a species to the Mediterranean's fossil crocodile record, which the authors tie to past changes in climate and sea level.
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An Oxford-led team found no animals in 140 samples from Mongolia's Kheseen Biota, a fossil bed formed after animals are known to have existed. That weakens the main argument for an Ediacaran start and leaves room for animals before or during Snowball Earth.
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Tel Aviv and Nanjing researchers describe Cretodorus noonoo, a 99-million-year-old amber planthopper with mouthparts nearly twice its body length. Scans of the folded mouthparts and the lack of pollen point to a sap feeder that bent them into bark cracks.
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Eric del Campo's team names Pampaluctor calibar, a roughly 100-kg saber-toothed marsupial relative from rocks younger than its group was thought to reach. Its presence beside the first North American carnivores weakens the case for a quick takeover, though one skull-less skeleton cannot say how the natives finally vanished.
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Cambridge and Berlin researchers mapped 97-million-year-old magnetofossils in 3D, finding structures suited to sensing Earth's field direction and strength. The maker is unidentified, so the navigation claim rests on inferring behavior from magnetic structure.
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Oxford-led researchers say the 590-million-year-old Weng'an Biota wrongly caps animal origins, pushing a clock estimate back about 200 million years. The resulting 800-to-700-million-year range depends on which older deposits replace Weng'an as the ceiling.
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AMNH and Oxford researchers report in Nature that 345-million-year-old Westlothiana had gills and a primitive skull. That takes away a fossil researchers have long used to date the origin of the group that includes reptiles, birds and mammals.
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Bat1K researchers' Nature study of 103 genomes and 44 fossils puts the most likely origin of bats in Europe, 65 to 60 million years ago. The same model places powered flight and echolocation near the root of the tree, before modern bat groups began to split.
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Clayton Forster's University of Arkansas team found higher carbon-13 ratios in coastal than inland Cretaceous teeth up to 113 million years old. If the team's seaweed explanation holds, storm-fed coastal food webs already existed in the greenhouse Cretaceous.
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Two Field Museum interns named Jeanerpeton, a 309-million-year-old amphibian relative the museum had filed under a known species. A co-author says that species name has become a catchall in the collection, so more fossils filed under it may prove to be separate animals.
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Filed as a crustacean larva for four decades, Chosha praecursor turns out to be an adult female insect with nine pairs of abdominal limbs, and it argues that the move onto land ran through a long semiaquatic stretch.
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Wyoteuthis linsterorum has a guard up to 6 cm wide where Wyoming's ordinary belemnites manage 1 to 2 cm, a difference in proportion that took two specimens found two decades apart to establish.
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The best Mesozoic feather yet described came out of a coprolite from Montana's Hell Creek, and it belonged to a flightless diver the asteroid killed, which makes modern feather architecture older than the survivors.
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A UCLA team read rare-isotope bonds in Tyrannosaurus rex tooth enamel and got about 36 degrees Celsius, a figure that took some 15 years of work to make measurable from a museum-sized sample.
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In North Sea drill cores, Dirk Knaust found more than 20 fossil vomit pellets whose shellfish needed steady ocean salinity to live. He argues the mismatch means plesiosaurs brought their meals inshore.
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The Bat1K consortium's Nature paper samples every one of the 21 recognised bat families and dates the group to roughly 65 million years ago, with the geography resting on where 44 fossil bats were found.
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S. Oyabu and colleagues named Nipponopelta yezoensis from CT scans of a 1995 Hokkaido fossil, one of only three nodosaurid species known from Asia. Its North American anatomy fits a Bering land-bridge crossing, though Asia's patchy fossil record limits the inference.
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A University of Regina group took a fractured Tyrannosaurus rex rib to two neutron instruments at Oak Ridge in April 2026, six years after X-ray scans first found soft tissue inside it, and the lab describes the neutron result as confirmation.
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Dinodontosaurus isiyavamanda, described from bones a British expedition collected in the 1960s, extends a South American genus into Tanzania. The shared genus argues that those Tanzanian beds are no older than South America's.
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The hexagonal fossil burrow networks have been credited to worm-like animals since the 1970s, and a synthesis in Earth Science Reviews measures their corners and concludes the digger had jointed legs and a shell.
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Science · September 20, 2026 · 1 publisherOne report
Science · September 20, 2026 · 1 publisherOne report
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Science · September 11, 2026 · 2 publishersConfirmed
Science · September 11, 2026 · 1 publisherOne report
Science · September 11, 2026 · 1 publisherOne report
Science · August 21, 2026 · 1 publisherOne report