For a long time, the default image of early life on Earth was something almost monotonously simple: a thin bacterial soup quietly drifting through lifeless oceans, with billions of years still to go before anything interesting would show up. That picture is changing fast. What researchers are finding instead is a microbial world of surprising ...
Few creatures in Earth’s long history commanded their environment the way the Pliosaurus did. They were among the largest marine reptiles to ever exist, and for the majority of their time on this planet they ruled the world’s oceans as apex predators for more than 80 million years. That’s not a brief moment of dominance ...
Most people associate ancient cave art with Europe. You probably picture the painted bison of Altamira or the horses of Chauvet. Yet North America holds its own remarkable underground legacy, one that remained largely unknown to outside researchers until just a few decades ago. Similar cave art had never been found in North America until ...
Picture a creature the size of a bus, lumbering through a Late Jurassic forest roughly 150 million years ago, wearing a crown of enormous kite-shaped plates along its spine. The quadrupedal Stegosaurus is one of the most easily identifiable dinosaur genera, due to the distinctive double row of kite-shaped plates rising vertically along the rounded ...
Picture the woolly rhinoceros, that ancient titan of the Ice Age, forging its way through glacial wind and frozen tundra without hesitation. This extraordinary creature was an extinct Ice Age rhinoceros of Eurasia, fully adapted to cold steppe-tundra environments, with a thick coat, a robust build, and two horns. It didn’t ask for easier terrain. ...
Picture a sail-backed creature with serrated, fang-like teeth prowling a vast swampy floodplain, ruling its ecosystem with no competition in sight. You’d be forgiven for imagining a dinosaur. The sail, the predatory posture, the sheer strangeness of the body shape, all of it points toward something ancient and reptilian. The truth, though, is far more ...
Roughly 225 million years ago, the first mammals were creatures you would never have bet on. Small, nocturnal, and overshadowed entirely by dinosaurs, they seemed destined for obscurity. Small mammals, hiding in burrows and feeding on diverse diets, managed to pull through one of the most catastrophic extinction events life has ever known. Their secret ...
Sixty-six million years ago, something ended a reign that had lasted over 160 million years. The non-avian dinosaurs, in all their extraordinary variety, vanished from every continent on Earth. What seems like a settled story turns out, on closer inspection, to be one of the most actively debated questions in all of science. The more ...
Picture a vast, frozen continent where towering mammoths move in herds across open tundra, where giant ground sloths leave trails wide enough to walk through, and where bands of people follow at a careful distance, watching, waiting, surviving. That image is not fiction. It’s the best understanding researchers currently have of how the first humans ...
If you’ve ever swatted at a dragonfly and thought it was too big, you haven’t seen anything yet. Roughly 300 to 360 million years ago, long before dinosaurs took a single step, the land that would eventually become North America was a vastly different world. It was warm, swampy, and draped in dense forests of ...
