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.

Baleen whales are the titans of the ocean, the largest animals to have ever lived. The record holder is the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus), which can reach lengths of up to 30 meters. That's longer than a basketball court.

However, throughout their evolutionary history, most baleen whales were relatively much smaller, around five meters in length. While still big compared to most animals, for a baleen whale that's quite small.

However, new fossil discoveries from the Southern Hemisphere are beginning to disrupt this story. The latest is an unassuming fossil from the banks of the Murray River in South Australia.

Turns out our love of sweet food goes back—way back—to our early primate ancestors, a University of Otago-led study has found.

The work sheds light on the dietary habits of early anthropoids, which includes fossil monkeys and apes, through analysis of tooth-chipping patterns and cavities.

Published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, the study used fossils from the Fayum Depression in Egypt, an invaluable source for understanding anthropoid evolution spanning from the late Eocene to the early Oligocene period, or 40 to 29 million-years-ago.

Most animals and plants never fossilize. For those that do, it's usually only hard parts such as bones and shells that preserve. However, in some exceptional cases, soft tissues such as muscles and gills survive the fossilization process and can present a wealth of information about the biology and ecology of ancient organisms.

In a paper recently published in Palaeontologia Electronica, Dr. Adiel Klompmaker, University of Alabama Museums' curator of paleontology, and colleagues reported on a remarkable crab with multiple mineralized soft tissues preserved. This crab lived 75 million years ago during the Cretaceous in the area of present-day South Dakota in an ancient sea known as the Western Interior Seaway.

A team of paleontologists revealed a remarkable fossil: a young tyrannosaurid with the hindlimbs of two year-old dinosaurs in its stomach. In other words, this theropod was chowing down on baby legs.

About 6 million years ago, in the deep forests of eastern Africa, something spectacular happened. Chimpanzees, our closest relative in the animal kingdom, evolved in one direction, while our earliest ancestors continued in another.

Over the next millions of years, the differences between early humans and chimpanzees became greater and greater. Our ancestors climbed down from the trees, began to walk upright on two legs, and thus freed their hands to handle tools.

This was the beginning of a development that ended with humans conquering most of the globe.

About 2.1 million years ago, the first humans—Homo erectus—migrated from Africa. The journey went through northeastern Africa and the Middle East—areas that are mainly covered by desert today—and onwards to Europe and Asia.

For a long time, researchers have speculated on how Homo erectus could cross the dry and merciless desert, where there was neither food, water nor shade.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, a Colombian priest named Padre Gustavo Huertas collected rocks and fossils near a town called Villa de Levya. Two of the specimens he found were small, round rocks patterned with lines that looked like leaves; he classified them as a type of fossil plant. But in a new study, published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, researchers re-examined these "plant" fossils and found that they weren't plants at all: they were the fossilized remains of baby turtles.

"It was truly surprising to find these fossils," says Héctor Palma-Castro, a paleobotany student at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

Researchers have provided new insights into how ancestral elephants developed their dextrous trunks.

The study, published Nov. 27 as a Reviewed Preprint in eLife, combines multiple analyses to reconstruct feeding behaviors in the extinct longirostrine elephantiforms—elephant-like mammals characterized by elongated lower jaws and tusks.

The editors describe the work as fundamental to our understanding of how the elongated lower jaw and long trunks evolved in these animals during the Miocene epoch, around 11–20 million years ago. It provides compelling evidence for the diversity of these structures in longirostrine gomphotheres, and their likely evolutionary responses to global climatic changes.

A team of paleontologists and biologists from Hokkaido University, Hokkaido University Museum, North Carolina State University and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, has uncovered a previously unknown species of dinosaur that appears to have slept in the same position as modern birds.

In their paper published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the group describes where the fossil was found, its condition, and the unique position in which the specimen had folded itself before dying.

A study published in Diversity provides new insight into how toothed whales and dolphins came to navigate the underwater world using sound waves.

Whales and dolphins, which lack external ears, rely on a technique called echolocation to navigate and hunt in the dark. Much like shouting and listening for echoes, these animals emit high-pitched sounds that bounce off objects and reflect back at them, allowing them to map out their surroundings.

Their skulls and soft tissues near and within the blowhole are asymmetrical, meaning that a structure on one side is larger or differently shaped than its counterpart on the other side. This "lopsidedness" enables the production of sound. At the same time, a fat-filled lower jawbone conducts sound waves to the internal ear, allowing the animals to locate where sounds are coming from (directional hearing).

Yet, how whales and dolphins evolved this sophisticated "built-in sonar" is not fully understood.