Paleontology

Credit: Jennifer Dunne If you want to understand an ecosystem, look at what the species within it eat. In studying food webs -- how animals and plants in a community are connected through their dietary preferences -- ecologists can…

150 million-year-old shark was one of the largest of its timeCredit: © Sebastian Stumpf/Fabrizio De Rossi In a new study, an international research team led by Sebastian Stumpf from the University of Vienna describes an exceptionally…

Credit: Hugo Salais, Metazoa Studio A pioneering study by University of Bristol researchers finds that the evolution of teeth in the giant prehistoric shark Megalodon and its relatives was a by-product of becoming huge, rather…

Study reveals that Earth-abundant minerals convert sunlight into chemical energy, hinting at the evolution of photosynthesis in early bacteriaCredit: Earth Science Frontiers Photosynthesis, the process by which plants and other…

Credit: DePaul University/Kenshu Shimada A new study shows that the gigantic Megalodon or megatooth shark, which lived nearly worldwide roughly 15-3.6 million years ago and reached at least 50 feet (15 meters) in length, gave birth to…

Like many of today's millennials, adolescent Sabre-Toothed Cats stayed with family longer than expectedCredit: Illustration by Danielle Dufault © Royal Ontario Museum New research indicates adolescent offspring of the…

Most native species are going locally extinct, while introduced tropical species thriveCredit: © Paolo Albano The coastline of Israel is one of the warmest areas in the Mediterranean Sea. Here, most marine species have been at the…

Humans feeding leftover lean meat to wolves during harsh winters may have had a role in the early domestication of dogs, towards the end of the last ice age (14,000 to 29,000 years ago), according to a study published in Scientific…

Credit: University of Bristol New research by scientists at the University of Bristol explains how a 'stop-start' pattern of evolution, governed by environmental change, could explain why crocodiles have changed so little since the…

~2.0 to 1.8 million year-old archaeological site demonstrates that early humans had the skills and tools to cope with ecological changeCredit: Michael Petraglia Olduvai (now Oldupai) Gorge, known as the Cradle of Humankind, is a UNESCO…

Step into your new, microscopic time machine. Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder have discovered that a type of single-celled organism living in modern-day oceans may have a lot in common with life forms that existed…

For the first time in Israel: Drilling under the bed of the Dead Sea; Documents 220,000 years of earthquakesCredit: Tel Aviv University A first-of-its-kind study conducted under the bed of the Dead Sea reveals that a devastating…

Credit: Elena Stiles The asteroid impact 66 million years ago that ushered in a mass extinction and ended the dinosaurs also killed off many of the plants that they relied on for food. Fossil leaf assemblages from Patagonia,…

Researchers investigate teeth of a small carnivorous mammal that are almost 150 million years oldCredit: © Thomas Martin, Kai R. K. Jäger / University of Bonn Paleontologists at the University of Bonn (Germany) have succeeded in…

Three COVID-related news releases made the top 10Credit: Christina Hansen Wheat The most-visited news release on EurekAlert! in 2020 racked up just under 1 million hits - the most in the site's near 25-year history. The University of…

A diamond lasts forever, but that doesn't mean all diamonds have a common history Washington, DC-- A diamond lasts forever, but that doesn't mean all diamonds have a common history. Some diamonds were formed billions of years ago in…

First study to use stable calcium and strontium isotopes to examine oceanic anoxic eventCredit: Northwestern University EVANSTON, Ill. -- Around 120 million years ago, the earth experienced an extreme environmental disruption…

Credit: Government of Yukon While water blasting at a wall of frozen mud in Yukon, Canada, a gold miner made an extraordinary discovery: a perfectly preserved wolf pup that had been locked in permafrost for 57,000 years. The…

Credit: The University of Queensland A prehistoric croc measuring more than five metres long - dubbed the 'swamp king' - ruled south eastern Queensland waterways only a few million years ago. University of Queensland researchers…

A study of more than 1,400 protein-coding genes of fleas has resolved one of the longest standing mysteries in the evolution of insects, reordering their placement in the tree of life and pinpointing who their closest relatives are. The…