Scientists discovered some of the oldest bony fish fossils in China. The fossils explain the early history of animals with backbones.

When the asteroid ended the age of non-avian dinosaurs, it cleared ecological space on a global scale. Small survivors adapted quickly, and over the years, their descendants grew into animals that ...

Researchers discovered that a 215-million-year-old reptile started life on four legs and switched to two as an adult.

Two marsupial species presumed to be extinct have “risen from the dead” after being rediscovered on the island of New Guinea, which lies north of Australia. One is the pygmy long-fingered ...

In paleontology, lineages that drop out of the fossil record and then re-emerge after long periods are termed ‘Lazarus taxa.’ ...

Millions of years ago, some prehistoric otters grew far larger than any species alive today. Fossils of the giant otter Siamogale show a powerful predator with jaws capable of crushing hard shells and ...

Roughly 425 million years ago, in the warm seas over what is now southern China, there lived a meter-long bony fish with jaws ...

That visibility comes with scrutiny. Mammals are among the best-studied organisms on Earth - and among the most threatened.

The Spinosaurus is a sail-backed, crocodile-snouted dinosaur that Hollywood depicted as a giant terrestrial predator capable ...

After years of analysis, the animal turned out to be an entirely new species — one that lived millions of years longer than ...

The caution kept the mammoth extinction story intact, but it turned the bones into a new kind of mystery. A run of ...

The pygmy long-fingered possum and the ring-tailed glider, two marsupials believed to have died out thousands of years ago, are still alive in Papuan Indonesia.