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Fossils
In a lightless canyon at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, Earth has been quietly collecting dead whales. Scientists have just discovered the archive.
Astronomers study our cosmic history through stellar and galactic archaeology. But we can't conduct archaeology in space. At least, not yet.
A big open question in 21st-century science is how life began here on Earth. The metabolism-first scenario just might be the best one.
In “The Secret History of Denisovans,” Silvana Condemi and François Savatier trace the story of our mysterious hominin ancestor.
If an asteroid hadn't killed off the dinosaurs, humans would almost certainly have never walked the Earth.
New research challenges old assumptions about the evolution of the human brain.
An analysis of Indonesian cave paintings is reframing the history of human art, though whether the paintings really were created by human hands remains an open question.
The Moon is the most likely place for evidence from the dawn of life on Earth to be preserved in cold storage.
Well-preserved ancient plants and other finds at the Clarkia fossil beds hint at what kind of evidence any Martian life may have left behind.
Despite billions of years of life on Earth, humans first arose only ~300,000 years ago. It took all that time to make our arrival possible.
Although mammals may be the dominant form of life today, we're relative newcomers on planet Earth. Here's our place in natural history.
For billions of years on Earth, life was limited to simple unicellular, non-differentiated organisms. In a mere flash, that changed forever.
The study suggests that human ancestors expanded across Europe faster than previously thought.
The discovery suggests that the "Boring Billion" period of evolution on Earth wasn't so boring after all.
These nematodes complicate how we understand evolutionary lineages.
Carnivorous plants fascinate as much now as when their gruesome diet was first discovered.
A 1.5-million-year-old hominin bone shows signs that the victim was eaten by lions — and humans.
There were at least eight other human species, some of whom existed for far longer than we have. Who were they?
Fossil Cycad National Monument held America’s richest deposit of petrified cycadeoid plants, until it didn’t.
Hybrid animals emerge when two different species from the same family reproduce. For many years, the kunga’s lineage was just another genetic mystery.
People discovered prehistoric fossils long before Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species." The remains of these unknown creatures often puzzled their discoverers.
A marine reptile fossil from Svalbard challenges ideas about evolution and Earth’s greatest mass extinction.
Embark on a journey through one of the most profound ecological transitions in the history of complex life.
Each year, several trillion pounds of microscopic silicon-based skeletons fall down the water column to pile up into siliceous ooze.
Evolution repeatedly hit upon this solution simply because it works.
The spikes in their mouths would have helped them catch squid or fish.
Who's for dinner?
Tracing the origin and development of jaws — and other anatomical features that humans share — sheds some light on how we came to be.