Pterosaur fossils have been discovered on every continent, including Antarctica. Yet much of the evolutionary history of pterosaurs familiar to us today has long been shaped by the comparatively rich fossil records of Europe, Asia, and North America. The picture becomes far more fragmentary when we turn to Gondwana, the great landmass that once dominated the Southern Hemisphere. Some regions have yielded nearly complete skeletons and even soft tissues, whereas others are repr

Flowers and fruits are among the most characteristic reproductive structures of angiosperms. Exactly when angiosperms first appeared has long remained uncertain, but a group of plant fossils from Henan Province, China, may push their history back into the Permian. A newly described fossil fruit, named Baipingfructus wuii, is currently known only from its fruit structure. No leaves, branches, or other plant organs have yet been found in definite organic connection with it, so

Late Cretaceous Europe looked very different from the continent we know today. Rising seas fragmented the land into numerous islands of varying sizes, forming an extensive archipelago. Prolonged geographic isolation helped shape distinctive dinosaur communities, in which some relict lineages persisted while certain species underwent insular dwarfism. Yet one conspicuous gap remained. Ceratopsians (Ceratopsia) were diverse and widespread in contemporary Asia and North America,

Birds possess one of the most specialized respiratory systems among vertebrates. In addition to a pair of lungs, they have multiple air sacs distributed throughout the body. Working together with the ribs, sternum, and associated muscles, these structures enable air to flow unidirectionally through the lungs, greatly increasing the efficiency of gas exchange. An often-overlooked but crucial component of this respiratory system is the uncinate process—a bony projection extendi

After spending tens of millions of years buried underground and undergoing mineralization, dinosaur bones become fossil remains composed largely of inorganic minerals. Yet for microscopic organisms living in soil, a buried bone filled with pores and canals can still provide an accessible habitat. In recent years, several microscopy studies have reported nematode-like structures within fossil bones of ceratopsians, tyrannosaurids, and hadrosaurs. One study even succeeded in ex

How can we tell where a river flowed from more than 200 million years after it disappeared? Its channels may have long since been buried, while the surrounding mountains have undergone prolonged erosion and deformation, but the sand carried by the river can preserve clues to its history. Triassic strata in the Bowen Basin of eastern Australia contain just such a sedimentary record. By analysing detrital zircons and the composition of sandstone fragments, researchers sought to

Cretaceous pterosaur fossils have been discovered in Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Jordan, yet Egypt, situated between these regions, had long lacked any confirmed record of the group. That gap has now been filled by a single wing phalanx. A three-dimensionally preserved pterosaur bone, catalogued as MUVP 507, was discovered in the Bahariya Oasis of Egypt's Western Desert. The specimen is extensively ferruginized, giving its surface a dark reddish-brown coloration, and comes

Many studies suggest that many of today's most diverse groups of animals and plants originated through evolutionary radiation—a process in which a lineage rapidly diversifies into a wide variety of species over a relatively short period of time. Research on Archosauria conducted in the twenty-first century supports this view. Previous studies have proposed that archosaurs experienced multiple episodes of evolutionary radiation, including the rapid diversification of major arc

Aside from Early Jurassic deposits in the Central Transantarctic Mountains, most Cretaceous dinosaur fossils known from Antarctica have come from the James Ross Sub-Basin near the Antarctic Peninsula. Fossils of ankylosaurs, ornithopods, non-avian theropods, and birds have all been discovered there, yet the Antarctic sauropod record remains exceptionally sparse, consisting of only two body fossils. One of them had already been brought back to the British Antarctic Survey in 1

The genus Lystrosaurus is one of the best-known dicynodonts (Dicynodontia) from the latest Permian to Early Triassic, with an exceptionally abundant fossil record in the Karoo Basin of South Africa. Yet among these numerous specimens, no individual had been confidently identified as an embryo. Among the smallest Lystrosaurus specimens currently known, one specimen, NMQR 3636, preserves the entire animal tightly curled into an ovoid shape. Following high-resolution computed to