paleontology

Maine Coons seem huge for domesticated cats. But Smilodon populator is the biggest species of one of the biggest cats of all time: the saber-toothed tiger.

Part of the appeal of chameleons lies in their ability to fire their long sticky tongues out of their mouths to capture insects to eat. Scientists recently discovered an animal from 99 millions years that had the same kind of tongue.

In 2020 paleontologists found the oldest fossil evidence of a parasite ever, in 540 million-year-old rocks in Yunnan Province, China.

The molecular working parts of living things are complex organic molecules with a backbone of carbon atoms. Some scientists think that hot springs might have provided the special chemical environments needed to link simple molecules up to form these longer and more complicated molecules.

Rudist clams were around in the late Cretaceous and are extinct today. Their fossils can tell us a lot of surprising things, such as the length of a day 70 million years ago.

The largest shark that ever lived is called Otodus megalodon. Its teeth were as big as a human hand. The oldest fossil evidence dates from 20 million years ago, and it became extinct just 3.5 million years ago.

Chewed up dinosaur bones are a pretty common find in Colorado's Mygatt-Moore Quarry. According to a recent story, about 29% of 2,368 dinosaur bones researchers found had bite marks from the serrated teeth of therapods, carnivorous dinosaurs that roamed the region in the late Jurassic period 150 million years ago.

Some of us have Neanderthal genes, and there's nothing wrong with that. There's research showing that women with a certain gene variant, or allele, inherited from Neanderthals are more fertile than women without it, and that 15 to 20 percent of women in Europe have it.

The extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period is Earth's greatest murder mystery. 66 million years ago, something killed about 75 percent of all animals, including the dinosaurs.

Scientists in Australia identified a new extinct marsupial using a fossil of its molar tooth they found in a newly discovered fossil site in remote Queensland. They decided to name is Whollydooleya tomnpatrichorum.