Palaeontology
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How to survive a mass extinction
Why certain animals can thrive in dramatic temperature changes.
Some animals not only survived a mass extinction following a dramatic and sudden climate shift 252 million years ago,...
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Did malaria help kill off the dinosaurs?
Origins of the disease are much earlier than thought.
Malaria, previously thought to have been a relatively modern disease, may have plagued the dinosaurs, a new study sug...
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Fossilised spider relative could not spin silk
A discovery gives insight into the evolution of modern-day spiders.
The discovery of an ancient, tarantula-like creature in a French mine has bridged a gap in spider lineage. The fossi...
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Missing link that led T-rex to top of food chain
Brains, not brawn, delivered Tyrannosaurus the crown.
Cunning Tyrannosaurus rex giants may have once ruled on land, but how they climbed to the throne has puzzled scientis...
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Turtles born out of mass croc extinction
As their predators died off, marine turtles came to the fore.
Marine turtles, as we know them today, got an evolutionary leg-up (or flipper-up) when a huge number of ancient croco...
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What killed off the vicious ichthyosaur?
The culprits that forced the ichthyosaurs demise.
The dolphin-like ichthyosaur was king of the ocean, reigning at the top of the food chain. But some 90 million years ...
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Species of ancient flower preserved in amber
The earliest example of an asterid found in the New World.
A new species of ancient flower, preserved in amber has been unveiled in a paper published online in Nature Plants. ...
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Secrets of Australia's marsupial lion revealed
Marsupial lion could tear apart a rhinoceros-sized mammal.
Australia’s largest and most ferocious land predator just got scarier. Thylacoleo carnifex, the "marsupial lion" tha...
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Wildebeest shared nose with a dinosaur
Structural similarities with a convergent evolution.
An ancient wildebeest-like creature shared remarkably similar features with "duck-billed" dinosaurs, a new study of s...
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Massive ancient crocodile unearthed
Twice as big as any of its modern cousins.
Palaeontologists have unearthed a massive ancient crocodile that would have weighed in at 3,000 kilograms and been ne...
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Ancient fossil forests unearthed in Norway
Among the Earth’s first trees.
Ancient fossil forests, thought to be partly responsible for one of the most dramatic shifts in the Earth's climate i...
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Dinosaur's temperature sheds light on evolution
Dinosaurs were neither warm nor cold-blooded.
Were dinosaurs cold or warm-blooded? For 150 years, palaeontologists have argued the point. Now a new piece of eviden...