Oh, baby. The discovery of a one-month-old tuatara, a rare reptile descended from lizard-like dinosaurs, has conservationists in New Zealand celebrating. The critter is the first baby tuatara to be spotted on the mainland there in two centuries, since zoologists released 200 adults inside the Kaori Wildlife Sanctuary beginning four years ago in the hope [...]

They may run, swim or fly. They may weigh less than a penny or more than a dozen school buses. From humans to whales to bats, the placental mammals—so named for the placenta that nourishes the fetus during development—are mind-bogglingly diverse. (The placental mammals are one of three major groups of mammals; the other two [...]

RALEIGH—Twenty years ago, paleontologist Mary Schweitzer made an astonishing discovery. Peering through a microscope at a slice of dinosaur bone, she spotted what looked for all the world like red blood cells. It seemed utterly impossible—organic remains were not supposed to survive the fossilization process—but test after test indicated that the spherical structures were indeed [...]

Move over platypus, a recently discovered dinosaur may have bested you for the strangest combination of physical features. Two hundred million years ago, a two-foot- long, beaked biped covered in quills scampered about an area that is now part of South Africa. The dinosaur’s discoverer is paleontologist Paul Sereno, of the University of Chicago. Sereno [...]

A new species of feathered dinosaur has been discovered, and its gigantic size makes it the largest-known feathered animal, living or extinct. Yutyrannus huali lived in northeastern China 125 million years ago, according to a group of scientists in China, where three specimens of the bipedal tyrannosaur were found. A description of the new dinosaur [...]

Large tyrannosaurs managed to attain their status in the dinosaur kingdom among theropods wielding just two fingers at the end of their rather reduced arms. But they are now outdone in the realm of digital reduction. In this group where three fingers is the norm, an unusual new dinosaur has come to light that had [...]

Three newly discovered groups of fossilized footprints show that dinosaurs and their early relatives were stalking the Earth some five million to nine million years earlier than scientists had previously estimated. This represents "a substantial extension of early dinosaur history," noted researchers in a description of the find, which was published online October 5 in [...]

Some dinosaurs had feathers; others had extendable claws or elaborate spikes. But a newly described species is the first to have been found with a distinctively humped back. The six-meter-long theropod (Concavenator corcovatus) hunted in modern-day Spain some 125 million years ago. Unlike a camel’s fatty hump, this carnivorous dinosaur’s bump was made of solid [...]

Some 100 million to 65 million years ago, when Europe was an island archipelago, a small horned dinosaur roamed what is now Hungary. Fossil remains from this tiny dinosaur represent the first ceratopsian found in Europe and shed new light on the distribution and movement of dinosaurs during that period. It is described online May [...]

Tyrannosaur bones are relatively familiar finds on the northern continents of the globe, cropping up everywhere from modern-day Colorado to China. But until now, they appeared to be oddly missing from the southern half of the globe. The discovery of a distinctively tyrannosaur-like hipbone in Victoria, Australia, however, might change the way scientists think about [...]

It looked like a dinosaur, walked like a dinosaur, and ate like, well, some dinosaurs, but a newly discovered species of archosaur, which lived 240 million years ago, was not a dinosaur. It was an ancient silesaur, which emerged 10 million years before true dinos did. And its unearthing in Tanzania—the first early dinosaur-like animal [...]

When it comes to dinosaur art, it takes a lot to rise to prominence. The field is saturated with everyone and their brother who never lost their obsession with the terrible lizards they fantasized about as kids. So it is with no small amount of gravitas that Steve White makes this proclamation in the subtitle [...]

This bust of Dryptosaurus was sculpted by paleoartist Tyler Keillor for the Lake County Discovery Museum just outside of Chicago, Illinois. Tyler, a full-time paleoartist at the University of Chicago, is one of the many science artists taking the bull by the horns and diving into fundraising for their own work. He’s started a project [...]