Our Earth’s atmosphere was not always the safe haven it is today. New research, informed by ancient ocean fossils, provides a glimpse into a time when our planet’s atmosphere was inhospitable and ...

Imagine Earth at a time when it was almost unrecognizable—a landscape that was barren and with barely breathable air. That is what Earth looked like about 1.75 billion years ago. But scientists now ...

In a quiet part of what is now South Australia, more than half a billion years ago, life was locked in battle. The ocean floor teemed with small shelled creatures trying to stay alive as newly evolved ...

Fossil skulls reveal how extinct mammals smelled the world, with new research linking olfactory bulb size to gene counts.

They observed that the structure of tiny magnetic fields generated by the rotating electrons indicates that the organisms that created these fossils possessed magnetoreception.

When the remains of prehistoric creatures were discovered in Europe and the United States, it opened up a vociferous debate on the nature of time and the purpose of science. A lithograph illustrating ...

What can fossil records teach scientists about ancient ecosystems and marine environments? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address ...

Today, the Arabian Gulf is home to manatee-like marine mammals called dugongs that shape the seafloor as they graze on ...

Deep in some of Earth’s oldest rocks, traces of ancient life still linger, even when every cell has crumbled. You would not ...

(CNN) — Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same ...

A mega-catalog of 1,231 fossils reveals that Homo was never a rare species in Omo-Turkana and rewrites the history of our ...

An electron microscope image, colorized, shows different structures of pollen grains, including sunflower, morning glory and primrose. Dartmouth Electron Microscope Facility If pollen allergies are ...