About 201.3 million years ago, as the Triassic Period drew to a close, Earth experienced the end-Triassic mass extinction. At the time, enormous volcanic activity associated with the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province (CAMP) is estimated to have released roughly 100,000 gigatonnes of CO₂. The main phase of magmatic activity lasted for about 400,000 years and involved approximately 1 million cubic kilometres of magma intruding into the crust or erupting at the surface. Previou

Pterosaurs survived from the Triassic until the end of the Cretaceous, spanning nearly 180 million years of evolutionary history. During this immense interval, some species remained very small, whereas others evolved into giants with enormous wingspans. Their teeth, cranial crests, wings, and limbs also underwent extensive morphological change. A large-scale analysis of pterosaur macroevolution suggests that they experienced a flourishing period lasting about 115 million year

Around 100 million years ago, during the mid-Cretaceous, lush forests covered what is now Kachin State in northern Myanmar. Resin oozing from plants occasionally trapped small insects and eventually hardened into amber. Today, these pieces of amber offer rare glimpses of insect forms that vanished long ago from Mesozoic ecosystems. One specimen from the Hukawng Valley preserves an especially unusual male beetle. It possessed extraordinarily elaborate antennae and what appears

At the Mazon Creek Lagerstätte in Illinois, USA, an animal that has resisted classification for more than half a century continues to perplex palaeontologists. This is the Tully monster, Tullimonstrum gregarium. It lived approximately 309 million years ago during the Pennsylvanian Subperiod of the Carboniferous and measured about 8–35 cm in length. It had an elongate body, a long proboscis projecting from the front of the animal and terminating in a pair of pincer-like claws,

For a long time, when paleontologists discovered gastroliths inside the abdominal cavity of dinosaurs, they often regarded them as evidence of herbivory. This was because many living herbivorous birds swallow stones and use a muscular gizzard together with gastroliths to grind plant fibers. As a result, gastroliths have long been considered closely associated with plant-based diets. However, later studies found that many insectivorous, piscivorous, and even carnivorous birds

At the Bromacker fossil locality in the German state of Thuringia, a slab of fine-grained sandstone preserves a tightly packed cluster of small, overlapping bones. It bears no resemblance to a complete animal skeleton, nor does it have the regular outline commonly seen in coprolites. Nevertheless, it records a feeding event that took place approximately 293–290 million years ago. The specimen, catalogued as MNG 17001, dates to the Sakmarian stage of the early Permian. At the

Tyrannosauridae was one of the most iconic groups of large predatory dinosaurs of the Late Cretaceous. Its members were characterized by enormous skulls, short forelimbs, and elongate hindlimbs. The most famous among them was Tyrannosaurus rex, one of the largest terrestrial predators in Earth’s history. Although tyrannosaurid evolution, growth, biomechanics, and feeding behavior have been extensively studied, much less is known about their reproduction and early development.

Terror birds, also known as phorusrhacids, were members of the avian family Phorusrhacidae. Their fossil record extends from the middle Eocene to the Late Pleistocene. They possessed powerful hindlimbs adapted for running, together with skulls and beaks capable of subduing and processing prey. Some species reached enormous sizes. Kelenken guillermoi, for example, occupied a high-level predatory position in terrestrial ecosystems. Terror birds, however, were not all towering g

For much of the Cenozoic, sharks of the genus Otodus were the apex predators of coastal seas. From the Paleocene species Otodus obliquus to the famous Pliocene Otodus megalodon, members of this lineage were gigantic predators. During their evolution, their teeth also changed dramatically. Early species had relatively slender teeth with distinct lateral cusplets and smooth cutting edges, making them better suited for gripping and piercing prey. They were therefore likely to ha

Iguanodontia was one of the major clades of herbivorous ornithischian dinosaurs. Iguanodontians were once distributed across all continents, leaving a fossil record that spans Europe, North America, Asia and Africa. During the Late Jurassic, however, they were not yet the dominant players in herbivorous dinosaur faunas. Many terrestrial assemblages were still dominated by sauropodomorphs and thyreophorans. By the Early Cretaceous, that picture had changed dramatically: in man