When the identification of a fossil animal is completely based on a single bone, the design of the bone is important. Another Permian animal with no complete body akin only to the low jaws has a ...

Paleontologists surveying a dry riverbed in northeastern Brazil repeatedly encountered the same type of fossil: a lower jaw ...

The remains of a "weird" creature with a twisted jaw and sideways-facing teeth have been discovered in the Amazon jungle. Scientists say the plant-eater Tanyka was a “living fossil” when it stalked ...

Based only on jawbones, scientists have described a new salamander-like animal that would have been a “living fossil” for its ...

Of the few courses of value I have enrolled in while at Rutgers, one of my most favorite was the paleontology class taught by William Gallagher from the NJ State Museum (which, coincidentally, has ...

With so few fossils mapping out the transition debates went on for decades about the details of how vertebrates became adapted to life on land. This was not helped by some delays in the description of ...

Source: NOVA: "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" This media asset comes from NOVA: "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial". According to modern evolutionary theory, all populations of ...

Q: Tell me about some of the important fossils you've found in Pennsylvania. TD: One of the fascinating things we discovered early in the project was an animal that we named Hynerpeton, which means ...

The tracks left by organisms are among the most difficult of fossils to interpret. But just such evidence puts debate about the origins of four-limbed vertebrates (which include ourselves) on a ...

Misidentified as a rhizodont fish on its discovery in 1971, recent preparation has revealed the specimen to be a tetrapod of about 650 mm in presacral length, lacking only a few parts of the skull, ...

I love outdated museum displays. They marvelously represent the “history” part of natural history exhibits – dusty dioramas of old ideas that are a baseline for how much our understanding has changed.

Learn how Permian-era fossils from Brazil led researchers to a tetrapod with a twisted jaw from a lineage once thought ...