The prehistoric animal kingdom was a riot of colors, from iridescent-feathered dinosaurs to jet-black ink excreted by Jurassic squid relatives. Like modern-day animals, ancient species' hues helped them communicate, camouflage and even regulate body temperature. But reconstructing these colors today is a challenge because compounds and structures that color animals' skin, fur and feathers usually degrade or change during fossilization. Experts have developed methods to reliably detect structures and pigments related to dark colors like the black and brown of feathered dinosaurs, but other shades (like the yellow and reddish-orange made by pigments called pheomelanins) have been especially hard to pin down.

Now a team of scientists has filled in that missing chunk of the prehistoric palette by developing the first reliable test to detect these gingery colors in fossils. “Pheomelanin is clearly an elusive pigment, and these findings will absolutely help us to detect evidence of ginger pigments in other fossils,” says the study's lead author Tiffany Slater, a paleobiologist at University College Cork in Ireland. The results were recently published in Nature Communications.

Researchers have identified a newfound sauropod species that was the largest of its kind and one of the last living members of its family.

Paleontologists first discovered fossils from the species, now named Sidersaura marae, in 2012 in the Huincul Formation in Argentina's Neuquén Province. It took researchers multiple excavations over several years to retrieve the giant dinosaur parts, which came from four individuals, according to a study published Jan. 3 in the journal Historical Biology.

What are the origins of wings and tails in birds? This is one of the key questions in the evolution of animals. It has long been accepted that their evolution began in feathered dinosaurs.

Some of these dinosaurs had feathers on the tails and small wing-like feathers on their forelimbs. These small wing-like structures called 'proto-wings' are composed of special feathers known as pennaceous feathers—the stiff feathers found in the wings and tails of birds.

The ancient form of these feathers first emerged in dinosaurs during the Jurassic Period, and these dinosaurs, called Pennaraptorans, had proto-wings made of pennaceous feathers. However, it has been known that these proto-wings were too small for powered flight. Because we cannot time-travel to observe their behavior, what dinosaurs did and how they behaved remains unanswered.

Various functions of proto-wings and tail feathers in the ancestors of birds have been considered since John Harold Ostrom proposed the first idea 50 years ago that proto-wings were used to knock down insect prey by small predatory dinosaurs living on the ground and following their prey. However, how the small 'proto-wings' and feathered tails helped the dinosaurian ancestors of birds in their lives has not been resolved.

In the late 1970s, debate began about whether dinosaurs were at their peak or in decline before their big extinction. Scientists at that time noted that while dinosaur diversity seemed to have increased in the geologic stage that spanned 83.6 million to 71.2 million years ago, the number of species on the scene seemed to decrease during the last few million years of the Cretaceous. Some researchers have interpreted this pattern to mean that the asteroid that struck the Gulf of Mexico was simply the final blow for an already vulnerable group of animals.

However, others have argued that what looks like a decrease in the diversity of dinosaurs may be an artifact of how hard it is to accurately count them. Fossil formations might preserve different dinosaurs more or less often based on factors like their favored environment and how easily their bodies fossilized there. The accessibility of various outcrops could influence what kinds of fossils researchers have so far found. These biases are a problem because fossils are what paleontologists must rely on to conclusively answer how healthy dinosaur populations were when the asteroid hit.

Gliding winged-reptiles were among the ancient crocodile residents of the Mendip Hills in Somerset, researchers at the University of Bristol have revealed.

Kuehneosaurs looked like lizards, but were more closely related to the ancestors of crocodilians and dinosaurs. They were small animals that could fit neatly on the palm of a hand, and there were two species, one with extensive wings, the other with shorter wings, made from a layer of skin stretched over their elongated side ribs, which allowed them to swoop from tree to tree.

A new species of tyrannosaur from southern North America that may the closest known relative of Tyrannosaurus rex is described in a study published in Scientific Reports.

Sebastian Dalman and colleagues identified the new species—which they have named Tyrannosaurus mcraeensis—by examining a fossilized partial skull, which was previously discovered in the Hall Lake Formation, New Mexico, U.S.

Although these remains were initially assigned to T. rex and are comparable in size to those of T. rex (which was up to 12 meters long), the authors propose that they belong to a new species due to the presence of multiple subtle differences in the shape of, and joins between, the skull bones of the specimen and T. rex.

A new research paper published in Biology Letters has revealed that picrodontids—an extinct family of placental mammals that lived several million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs—are not primates as previously believed.

The paper—co-authored by Jordan Crowell, an Anthropology Ph.D. candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center; Stephen Chester, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center; and John Wible, Curator of Mammals at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History—is significant in that it settled a paleontological debate that has been brewing for over 100 years while helping to paint a more clear picture of primate evolution.

For the last 50 years, paleontologists have believed picrodontids, which were no larger than a mouse and likely ate foods such as fruit, nectar, and pollen, were primates, based on features of their teeth that they share with living primates. But by using modern CT scan technology to analyze the only known preserved picrodontid skull in Brooklyn College's Mammalian Evolutionary Morphology Laboratory, Crowell, the lead author on the paper, worked with Chester, the paper's senior author, and Wible to determine they are not closely related to primates at all.

An ancient mangrove forest with trees that towered up to 130 feet high has been discovered over 20 million years after a volcanic mudflow smothered it in what is now Panama, a new study reveals.

Researchers first discovered the fossils in 2018 during a geological expedition on Barro Colorado Island (BCI). The island sits in Panama's human-made Gatun Lake, which thousands of ships cross every year as they cruise through the Panama Canal. BCI once formed part of a hilly landscape that became partly submerged in 1913, when engineers dammed the Chagres River to build the canal, and was set aside as a nature reserve in 1923. Today, the tropical forests of BCI are some of the most intensively studied in the world.

Credit for discovering the first dinosaur bones usually goes to British gentlemen for their finds between the 17th and 19th centuries in England. Robert Plot, an English natural history scholar, was the first of these to describe a dinosaur bone, in his 1676 book The Natural History of Oxfordshire. Over the next two centuries dinosaur paleontology would be dominated by numerous British natural scientists.

But our study shows that the history of paleontology can be traced back much further into the past. We present evidence that the first dinosaur bone may have been discovered in Africa as early as 500 years before Plot's.

We're a team of scientists who study fossils in South Africa. Peering through the published and unpublished archaeological, historical and palaeontological literature, we discovered that there has been interest in fossils in Africa for as long as there have been people on the continent.

This is not a surprise. Humankind originated in Africa: Homo sapiens has existed for at least 300,000 years. And the continent has a great diversity of rock outcrops, such as the Kem Kem beds in Morocco, the Fayum depression in Egypt, the Rift Valley in east Africa and the Karoo in southern Africa, containing fossils that have always been accessible to our ancestors.

So it wasn't just likely that African people discovered fossils first. It was inevitable.

Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonized the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that scientists didn't know existed.

The new fossil animals have been named Timorebestia, meaning 'terror beasts' in Latin. Adorned with fins down the sides of their body, a distinct head with long antennae, massive jaw structures inside their mouth, and growing to more than 30cm in length, these were some of the largest swimming animals in the Early Cambrian times.

Primate social organization is more flexible than previously assumed. According to a new study led by University of Zurich, the first primates probably lived in pairs, while only around 15% of individuals were solitary.

Primates—and this includes humans—are thought of as highly social animals. Many species of monkeys and apes live in groups. Lemurs and other Strepsirrhines, often colloquially referred to as "wet-nosed" primates, in contrast, have long been believed to be solitary creatures, and it has often been suggested that other forms of social organization evolved later. Previous studies have therefore attempted to explain how and when pair-living evolved in primates.

More recent research, however, indicates that many nocturnal Strepsirrhines, which are more challenging to investigate, are not in fact solitary but live in pairs of males and females. But what does this mean for the social organization forms of the ancestors of all primates? And why do some species of monkey live in groups, while others are pair-living or solitary?

A new analysis of fossils believed to be juveniles of T. rex now shows they were adults of a small tyrannosaur, with narrower jaws, longer legs, and bigger arms than T. rex. The species, Nanotyrannus lancensis, was first named decades ago but later reinterpreted as a young T. rex.

The first skull of Nanotyrannus was found in Montana in 1942, but for decades, paleontologists have gone back and forth on whether it was a separate species, or simply a juvenile of the much larger T. rex.

Dr. Nick Longrich, from the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, and Dr. Evan Saitta, from the University of Chicago, have re-analyzed the fossils, looking at growth rings, the anatomy of Nanotyrannus, and a previously unrecognized fossil of a young T. rex.

The biggest animals ever to have walked on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as sauropods, and the most famous of these giants was likely Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard." For more than a century, scientists stopped using the genus name Brontosaurus, but in 2015, researchers suggested it was time to "resurrect" it. So why was Brontosaurus brought back from the dead, so to speak?

Over the past 15 years, through our scientific study of tracks and traces, we have identified more than 350 fossil vertebrate tracksites from South Africa's Cape south coast. Most are found in cemented sand dunes, called aeolianites, and all are from the Pleistocene Epoch, ranging in age from about 35,000 to 400,000 years.

During that time we have honed our identification skills and have become used to finding and interpreting tracksites—a field called ichnology. And yet, every once in a while, we encounter something we immediately realize is so novel that it has been found nowhere else on Earth.

Such a moment of unexpected discovery happened in 2019 along the coastline of the De Hoop Nature Reserve, about 200km east of Cape Town. Less than two meters away from a cluster of fossil elephant tracks was a round feature, 57cm in diameter, containing concentric ring features. Another layer was exposed about 7cm below this surface. It contained at least 14 parallel groove features. Where the grooves approached the rings, they made a slight curve towards them. The two findings, we hypothesized, were connected with each other and appeared to have a common origin.