An international team led by paleontologists Dr. Stephan Spiekman and Prof Dr. Rainer Schoch from the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart, Germany, describes a previously unknown tree-dwelling reptile from the early Middle Triassic in a study published in the journal Nature.

The 247-million-year-old reptile "Mirasaura grauvogeli," whose name means "Grauvogel's Wonder Reptile," had a dorsal crest with previously unknown, structurally complex appendages growing from its skin with some similarities to feathers. The crest was probably used for display to other members of the same species.

The find shows that complex skin structures are not only found in birds and their closest relatives but may predate modern reptiles. This important discovery forces us to reconsider our understanding of reptile evolution.

Today, Apple TV+ announced "Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age," a sweeping new installment of the award-winning natural history series from executive producers Jon Favreau and Mike Gunton, produced by BBC Studios Natural History Unit ("Planet Earth"), and narrated by Golden Globe Award and Olivier Award winner Tom Hiddleston ("Earthsounds"), with an original score by Hans Zimmer, Anže Rozman and Kara Talve from Bleeding Fingers Music. The five-part docuseries, set to premiere globally on November 26, 2025, invites viewers into a dramatic new era of prehistoric life, millions of years after the extinction of the dinosaurs — an era shaped by ice, the intense fight to survive and the rise of a new cast of giants: the iconic megafauna.

A new analysis of an exquisitely preserved fossil that lived half a billion years ago suggests that arachnids—spiders and their close kin—evolved in the ocean, challenging the widely held belief that their diversification happened only after their common ancestor had conquered the land.

Spiders and scorpions have existed for some 400 million years, with little change. Along with closely related arthropods grouped together as arachnids, they have dominated Earth as the most successful group of arthropodan predators. Based on their fossil record, arachnids appeared to have lived and diversified exclusively on land.

The newly-discovered fossil dates back to the Norian age of the Late Triassic epoch, some 206 million years ago.

It belongs to a previously unknown member of Massopoda, a large group of sauropodomorph dinosaurs that lived during the Late Triassic to Late Cretaceous epochs.

“Among the Mesozoic terrestrial vertebrate groups, Sauropodomorpha represents one of the most successful dinosaurian clades, as it became one of the most abundant and dominant herbivore components of both the Late Triassic and the Jurassic continental paleoecosystems with an almost global distribution, spatially spanning from Antarctica to Greenland,” said Dr. Alessandro Lania from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and his colleagues from Switzerland.

Named Pulaosaurus qinglong, the newly-identified dinosaur species lived in what is now China during the Jurassic period, around 160 million years ago.

The ancient reptile was part of the so-called Yanliao Biota, a Middle-to-Late Jurassic-aged ecosystem that included dinosaurs, mammals, amphibians, insects and lizards, as well as plants.

“The Yanliao Biota is one of the most significant Mesozoic, terrestrial lagerstätte in China, with an age that ranges from 168 to 157 million years and is comprised of fossil assemblages from the Jiulongshan and the Tiaojishan Formations,” said senior author Dr. Xing Xu, a paleontologist with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Yunnan University, and colleagues.

“In total, there have been 54 genera and 58 species of vertebrates reported from the Yanliao Biota, including nine species of non-avian dinosaurs.”

Niger is a dino wonderland because of two chance geologic events. The first unfolded 180 million years ago, during the early Jurassic, when the great landmass Gondwana began to break apart, forming a massive depression in the center of what is now the West African nation, then a verdant region teeming with life. For millions of years, the depression took in sediment and the skeletons of dinosaurs and other creatures.

The second event happened 20 million years ago, when a volcanic hot spot raised what’s known as the Aïr Massif on the edge of this depression, tilting the strata upward and returning to the surface the now fossilized skeletons. Driving across these rock layers today, heading from Agadez into the open desert, is a journey through deep time.

A team of researchers has identified and described Vulcanoscaptor ninoti ("the Camp dels Ninots volcano digger"), a previously unknown genus and species of Pliocene mole. The fossil was unearthed at the Camp dels Ninots paleontological site (Caldes de Malavella, Girona), one of the most important locations for studying the fauna that inhabited southern Europe more than 3.5 million years ago.

The specimen preserves the mandible with a complete dentition, part of the torso, and several bones from both the forelimbs and hindlimbs, many of them still in anatomical connection. This exceptional state of preservation is extremely rare in small mammals such as moles and makes this specimen one of the oldest and most complete ever found in Europe.

An extinct genus of ray-finned fish that lived during the Jurassic period seems to have had quite the penchant for overreaching.

A new analysis of fossilized Tharsis fish reveals that the carnivorous marine animals seem to have frequently met their end with large cephalopods known as belemnites lodged quite fatally in their gullets.

According to paleontologists Martin Ebert and Martina Kölbl-Ebert of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in Germany, Tharsis fish found in the 152 million-year-old Solnhofen Plattenkalk (limestone) formation in Germany appear in multiple instances to have died while attempting to swallow a belemnite nearly as long as themselves.

Australian tree frogs today make up over one third of all known frog species on the continent. Among this group, iconic species such as the green tree frog (Litoria caerulea) and the green and golden bell frog (Litoria aurea), are both beloved for their vivid colours and distinctive calls.

In the Early Eocene epoch, 55 million years ago, Australia’s tree frogs were hopping across the Australian continent from one billabong to the next through a forested corridor that also extended back across Antarctica to South America. These were the last remnants of ancient supercontinent Gondwana.

In new research published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, we identify Australia’s earliest known species of tree frog – one that once hopped and croaked around an ancient lake near the town of Murgon in south-eastern Queensland.

This research demonstrates tree frogs were present in Australia 30 million years earlier than previously thought, living alongside Australia’s earliest known snakes, songbirds and marsupials.

A Denver museum known for its dinosaur displays has made a fossil bone discovery closer to home than anyone ever expected, under its own parking lot.

It came from a hole drilled more than 750 feet (230 meters) deep to study geothermal heating potential for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The museum is popular with dinosaur enthusiasts of all ages. Full-size dinosaur skeletons amaze kiddos barely knee-high to a parent, much less to a Tyrannosaurus.

This latest find is not so visually impressive. Even so, the odds of finding the hockey-puck-shaped fossil sample were impressively small.

With a bore only a couple of inches (5 centimeters) wide, museum officials struggled to describe just how unlikely it was to hit a dinosaur, even in a region with a fair number of such fossils.

As herbivores, these animals had large teeth for grinding their diet of plants.

“These mammals can have enamel two to three millimeters thick. It was a lot of material to work with,” Dr. Green said.

“What we found — peptide fragments, chains of amino acids, that together form proteins as old as 18 million years — was field-changing.”

“Nobody’s ever found peptide fragments that are this old before.”

Until now, the oldest published materials are about 3.5 million years old.

Ankylosaurids (family Ankylosauridae) were herbivorous quadruped dinosaurs known for their robust, scute-covered bodies, distinctive body armor, leaf-shaped teeth, and club-like tails.

The earliest-known ankylosaurids date to around 122 million years ago, and the youngest species went extinct 66 million years ago during the end-Cretaceous extinction.

The newly-identified species belongs to a previously monospecific ankylosaurid genus called Zhongyuansaurus.

Named Zhongyuansaurus junchangi, it lived in what is now China during the Albian age of the latest Early Cretaceous.

The dinosaur’s fossilized remains were collected from the upper part of the Haoling Formation at Zhongwa village in Henan province, China.

Squids first appeared about 100 million years ago and quickly rose to become dominant predators in the ancient oceans, according to a study published in the journal Science.

A team of researchers from Hokkaido University developed an advanced fossil discovery technique that completely digitizes rocks with all embedded fossils in complete 3D form. It allowed them to identify one thousand fossilized cephalopod beaks hidden inside Late Cretaceous rocks from Japan. Among these small and fragile beaks were 263 squid specimens, including about 40 different species that had never been seen before.

The so-called Cambrian explosion is commonly labeled as the time in Earth’s history when animal body plans suddenly appear.

Most studies suggest that this event occurred between 541 million and 530 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian period.

“The Cambrian explosion is a unique period in the history of life that poses many unanswered questions,” said Dr. Olmo Miguez Salas from the Universitat Barcelona and Dr. Zekun Wang of the Natural History Museum, London.

Paleontologists studying rocks from Morocco have unearthed the most exquisitely preserved trilobite fossils yet discovered. The new lifelike fossils update our understanding of the evolution and biology of these extinct ocean-dwelling arthropods.

The details are so great that soft tissue parts of the trilobites, including the mouth and digestive tract, are clearly visible, researchers report June 27 in Science. Such parts are typically lost as the animals turn into fossils.

“These trilobite fossils represent the most complete specimens found to date, not only preserving the hard exoskeleton but also the soft parts in 3-D, such as the antennae, walking legs and the digestive system,” says paleontologist John Paterson of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

A partial skeleton found in the Fernie Formation in British Columbia, Canada, back in 1916 represents a new genus and species of an extinct marine reptile called ichthyosaur, according to an international team of paleontologists.

Fernatator prenticei lived in North America during the Early Jurassic epoch, around 190 million years ago.

“Ichthyosaurs — marine reptiles superficially resembling dolphins — were important marine predators from the Early Triassic (Olenekian) to the beginning of the Late Cretaceous (Cenomanian),” said Professor Judy Massare of SUNY College at Brockport and colleagues.

“They were the dominant large predators in the Triassic and Early Jurassic oceans.”

“Thousands of partial and complete skeletons of Early Jurassic ichthyosaurs have been collected, mainly from the UK and Germany.”

“Early Jurassic ichthyosaurs from North America are rare,” they noted.

“Thus, the discovery of a partial skeleton from western Canada is significant.”

A labrador-sized dinosaur was wrongly categorised when it was found and is actually a new species, scientists have discovered.

Its new name is Enigmacursor - meaning puzzling runner - and it lived about 150 million years ago, running around the feet of famous giants like the Stegosaurus.

It was originally classified as a Nanosaurus but scientists now conclude it is a different animal.

Enigmacursor is tiny by comparison. At 64 cm tall and 180 cm long it is about the height of a labrador, but with much bigger feet and a tail that was "probably longer than the rest of the dinosaur," says Professor Susannah Maidment.