Vertebrate fossils can tell us more than just what extinct animals looked like and how they evolved. When bones preserve evidence of injuries or diseases, they can also reveal aspects of an animal's lifestyle, immune responses, and ability to survive long-term illnesses. Over the past three decades, the rapid development of paleopathology has enabled scientists to identify various pathological conditions in Mesozoic reptiles, including fractures, infections, joint degeneratio

Today, lungfishes are restricted to Africa, South America, and Australia, with only six living species. Early in their history, however, lungfishes underwent a remarkably rapid burst of morphological evolution. They later shifted from predominantly marine environments into freshwater, while their diversity rose and fell through time. By the Mesozoic, the progressive breakup of Gondwana further isolated the surviving lungfish lineages, eventually leaving them separated across

In 1824, the British geologist William Buckland formally described and named Megalosaurus bucklandii, making it the first dinosaur to receive a scientific name. At the time, the concept of dinosaurs as a distinct taxonomic group did not yet exist; it was not until 1842 that Richard Owen established Dinosauria. Two centuries later, our understanding of the dinosaur world has changed enormously. By the end of 2025, a study compiling 200 years of dinosaur naming records recogniz

Trace fossils and body fossils provide two very different kinds of information. Skeletal remains allow paleontologists to reconstruct an animal's morphology and body size, whereas footprints preserve information such as pace, stride, and track arrangement, which can be used to investigate how extinct animals moved and how they interacted with their environments. Yet when an entire bedding surface is covered with depressions, fractures, and sedimentary structures, researchers

Exceptional fossil deposits (Konservat-Lagerstätten) preserve a remarkable abundance of exquisitely preserved fossils, often retaining soft tissues, skin, feathers, and other structures that rarely fossilize. As a result, they have long served as crucial evidence for reconstructing ancient ecosystems and biological evolution. However, such fossil deposits are extremely rare, particularly in humid tropical regions. Because high temperatures, abundant moisture, and intense biol

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