Tag Archives: Prehistoric

In 1960, a villager found something terrifyingly creepy in Greece’s Petralona cave—a humanoid cranium with a protrusion on its forehead, fused to the cave wall. Since then, researchers have been trying to date the strange specimen and understand how it got there, but these efforts so far have yielded only a frustratingly broad age range of between around 170,000 and …

Paleontologists have uncovered a 265-million-year-old fossil of Pampaphoneus biccai, one of South America’s largest predators before the dinosaurs. This discovery in southern Brazil sheds light on pre-dinosaur ecosystems and the events leading up to Earth’s largest extinction. The find underscores Brazil’s significance in paleontology, with a study in the Zoological Journal of Linnean Society highlighting how such fossils offer critical …

Prehistoric paintings found deep inside a perilously inaccessible cave in the French Pyrenees reveal how ancient hunter-gatherers risked their necks to conduct ritual activities in the bowels of the Earth. Known as Etxeberri Cave, the site is considered one of the most challenging caverns to have been explored by Palaeolithic humans, and may have been decorated as part of a …

A fresh look at early members of our lineage suggests that males and females were not built alike. The size gap was wide, and it likely shaped daily life in ways we do not see in people today. That conclusion comes from a new comparison of two classic Pliocene species that many readers know by name, but not by their …

Scientists have identified a new species of ancient whale with cartoonish bulging eyes that they say would have made it look like a Pokémon. A precursor to today’s modern whale species, the 25 million-year-old creature was “deceptively cute,” according to Erich Fitzgerald, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at Australia’s Museums Victoria Research Institute, as reported by the Toronto Sun. “It …

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — Long before whales were majestic, gentle giants, some of their prehistoric ancestors were tiny, weird and feral. A chance discovery of a 25 million-year-old fossil on an Australian beach has allowed paleontologists to identify a rare, entirely new species that could unlock mysteries of whale evolution. Researchers this week officially named Janjucetus dullardi, a cartoonish creature …

Fossils unearthed along Victoria’s Surf Coast have led to the discovery of an ancient whale species with special adaptations for hunting, including large eyes and sharp teeth, shedding light on early marine mammal evolution. The species has been named Janjucetus dullardi after Victoria local resident Ross Dullard, who found the ancient whale’s fossil fragments in 2019. Janjucetus dullardi is one …

A peer-reviewed study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society has documented the discovery of an exceptionally well-preserved fossil of a giant trapdoor spider in New South Wales, Australia. Measuring 23.31 millimeters in body length—about five times larger than modern trapdoor spiders—this extinct species, named Megamonodontium mccluskyi, dates back to the Miocene epoch and offers a rare window …

A collection of dinosaur teeth hailing back to the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods has given scientists a new window into the world’s prehistoric climate. By studying an isotope of oxygen in the fossils to infer atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, a team led by geochemist Dingsu Feng of the Georg August University of Göttingen in Germany has reconstructed the very air …

A new study has rewritten a key chapter in the story of vertebrate evolution. Researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil and the Smithsonian Institution in the United States have revealed that many of the muscles once believed to define the anatomy of the coelacanth, a fish often described as a “living fossil,” were in fact misidentified …