Paleontogly

Avian Brain Shape Dinosaurs

A team of paleontologists has digitally reconstructed the facial skeleton and brain endocast of Ichthyornis dispar, a toothed stem bird that lived in North America during the Late Cretaceous epoch and has traditionally been considered the nearest known well-understood relative of living birds. The ancestors of living birds had a …

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Giant Vampire Bat Found

Paleontologists in Argentina have found a fossilized jaw of the extinct bat species Desmodus draculae inside an ancient burrow of a giant sloth. Desmodus draculae in a burrow of a giant sloth. Image credit: Daniel Boh / Museo de Ciencias Naturales de Miramar. Desmodus draculae is an extinct species of …

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Ancient Woodlice

Paleontologists have performed a complete re-analysis of Oxyuropoda ligioides, a land-based peracarid crustacean first reported in 1908 from the Late Devonian floodplains of Ireland and left with unresolved systematic affinities despite a century of attempts at identification. Oxyuropoda ligioides in its 365-million-year-old continental environment (Kiltorcan, Kilkenny, Ireland). Image credit: Diane …

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Old Liana Fossil

Paleontologists have discovered what they say is the oldest macrofossil evidence of Paullinieae, a diverse group of tropical and subtropical climbing plants that belong to the soapberry family Sapindaceae. Transverse section of Ampelorhiza heteroxylon. Image credit: Jud et al., doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248369. Paullinieae are tropical and subtropical woody vines, herbaceous climbers, …

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Ceratopsid Dinosaur

A new genus and species of horned (ceratopsid) dinosaur has been identified from an incomplete skeleton found in New Mexico, the United States. Life reconstruction of Menefeeceratops sealeyi. Image credit: Sergey Krasovskiy. The newly-identified dinosaur species belongs to Centrosaurinae, a group of ceratopsid dinosaurs known primarily from the northern region …

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Mammal Footprints

The newly-discovered fossilized footprints were made by at least two mammalian species around 58 million years ago in a brackish water lagoon in what is now southern Wyoming, the United States, and may represent the earliest evidence of mammals gathering by the sea. Section of the 58-million-year-old tracksite demonstrating near-vertical …

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New Mosasaur Species

Paleontologists have described a new species of mosasaur based on two complete skulls and jaws found in Morocco. An artist’s impression of Pluridens serpentis. Image credit: Andrey Atuchin. Mosasaurs (family Mosasauridae) were specialized marine lizards that evolved and diversified during the Late Cretaceous epoch. Their diversity peaked in the Maastrichtian …

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Neotropical Rainforests

About 66 million years ago (the end of the Cretaceous period), a 10-km-wide asteroid crashed into Earth near the site of the small town of Chicxulub in what is now Mexico. The impact unleashed an incredible amount of climate-changing gases into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that led …

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New Research Shows

Trilobites had well-developed gill-like structures in their upper leg branches, according to a new imaging study led by the University of California, Riverside. Trilobite fossil preserved in pyrite. Image credit: Jin-Bo Hou / University of California, Riverside. Trilobites are extinct marine arthropods that dominated the ecosystems of the Paleozoic era. …

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Cretaceous Mammal

Fossiomanus sinensis and Jueconodon cheni, two distantly related species of mammaliamorphs that lived some 120 million years ago (Early Cretaceous epoch), were well adapted for fossorial (burrowing) life, and are the first ‘scratch-diggers’ known from the Jehol Biota, which is distributed mainly in western Liaoning Province and neighboring areas in …

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