When Pangea's tropical forests died 252 million years ago, Earth stayed in a hothouse for five million years. New fossil maps ...

A quarter of a billion years ago, long before dinosaurs or mammals evolved, the predator Dinogorgon, whose skull is shown here, hunted floodplains in the heart of today's South Africa. In less than a ...

A new species of ancient reptile has been named after spending more than 200 million years buried in the ground. Threordatoth chasmatos was one of the last survivors of the procolophonids, a group of ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A new Triassic fossil reveals a two-legged, beaked reptile that evolved along the crocodile lineage. (CREDIT: Jorge Gonzalez, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Reconstruction of Labrujasuchus expectatus, a new species of Shuvosauridae from Late Triassic rocks of Ghost Ranch, New Mexico.

It was relatively small compared to the giants that would follow it later in Earth’s history. With a hip height of approximately 0.3 meters (about a foot) and a length of perhaps a meter (roughly ...

The Triassic Period was a gnarly time to be alive on Earth, and not only because it was Act One of the age of dinosaurs. This epoch stretched from 251 to 199 million years ago, and was bookended by ...

Everything has its pecking order, and geology is no exception. The cocks of the rocks are the big, swaggering periods of the past that fill books, television programmes and natural-history museums.

Modern flying fish are remarkable for leaping from the water to glide in the air using long, winglike fins, presumably to escape aquatic predators. This extraordinary gliding strategy, unlike those in ...

Just over 200m years ago, the end-Triassic mass extinction killed off more than half of the species of organisms living on Earth’s land and in the oceans. We are only just beginning to understand how ...

As the great 20th century paleontologist William Diller Matthew once wrote, "The story of life on Earth is a splendid drama, as interesting as we watch its action and study the interplay of causes and ...