Paleontology

Kyoto University researchers re-examined three 1990s fossils to identify a new genus of giant salamander that lived in Japanese lakes 3.5 million years ago.

A Nature study extracts 11 proteins from six Homo erectus teeth found in China, revealing a shared amino acid variant with Denisovans now present in some Southeast Asian and Oceanian populations.

A German-Argentine team has described a 155-million-year-old long-necked dinosaur from Chubut, mixing brachiosaurid and diplodocid traits.

The 31-foot Late Cretaceous dinosaur-eating crocodilian has been reconstructed in full for the first time using 3D scans of fossils collected over four decades, with the only mounted cast unveiled at the Tellus Science Museum.

An analysis of 2,456 mitochondrial genomes published in Science Advances identifies two distinct maritime routes humans used to reach Sahul roughly 60,000 years ago.

Researchers identify 24 amphipod species, a new family, and a new superfamily in a region targeted for deep-sea mining.

A trove of late Ediacaran fossils in Yunnan province reveals bilaterians, deuterostomes, and comb jellies existed at least four million years before the Cambrian explosion, reshaping the timeline of animal evolution.

Queen's University Belfast researchers have identified more than 600 suspected house platforms at a Bronze Age hillfort in County Wicklow, proposing it as Ireland's earliest proto-town, two millennia before the Vikings.

Genome-wide analysis of 11,000-year-old remains from the Donghulin site near Beijing has identified a deeply divergent northern East Asian lineage with no match in any previously studied population, offering new evidence that cultural continuity does not guarantee genetic continuity.

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.