Paleontology

A fossil assemblage preserved as carbonaceous films in Yunnan Province reveals more than 700 specimens of complex animals, including the oldest known deuterostomes, dating to 554-539 million years ago and closing a major gap between the Ediacaran period and the Cambrian explosion.

A 90-million-year-old skeleton from Argentina reveals that alvarezsaur dinosaurs shrank to under two pounds before evolving their hallmark ant-eating adaptations, upending decades of evolutionary assumptions.

Spinosaurus mirabilis, the first new spinosaurid species in over a century, has been identified from fossils in Niger's Sahara, challenging the view that these predators were coastal.

Paleontologists have recovered tiny fossilized teeth of Purgatorius from Colorado's Denver Basin, marking the southernmost occurrence ever documented and suggesting that archaic primates dispersed rapidly across western North America within hundreds of thousands of years of the dinosaur extinction.

Paleontologists report paired discoveries from China that rewrite the early chapter of bony fish evolution and, by extension, the evolutionary lineage leading to all living vertebrates including humans.

A team led by the University of Chicago has named Spinosaurus mirabilis, a scimitar-crested, fish-eating theropod found 500–1,000 km from the nearest ancient sea, reshaping what scientists know about where spinosaurs lived.