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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

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

Non-avian dinosaur fossils have been discovered on nearly every continent. In Chile, several different groups of dinosaurs have been identified from fossil remains. However, compared to skeletal fossils, dinosaur track fossils are far more abundant in Chile, and these tracks have greatly expanded the dinosaur record of the country. At present, most dinosaur track fossils in Chile have been discovered in northern Chile and range in age from the Late Jurassic to the Early Creta

The Paleocene, the first epoch of the Paleogene, marks the beginning of the Cenozoic after the end of the Cretaceous. The phrase "Paleocene non-avian dinosaur" therefore challenges one of the most familiar boundaries in palaeontology: non-avian dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, and no non-avian dinosaurs are known to have lived during the Paleocene. If non-avian dinosaurs truly survived into the Paleocene, that would reshape our understanding of the Creta

For decades, many palaeontologists have regarded several small-bodied, gracile tyrannosaur-like specimens—such as CMNH 7541, BMRP 2002.4.1, and KUVP 156375—as juvenile individuals of Tyrannosaurus rex. Under this interpretation, T. rex would have undergone extreme ontogenetic transformations, shifting from a slender, cursorial juvenile form to a massive apex predator in adulthood.

From the Cambrian to the Ordovician, many animal phyla first appeared and diversified rapidly, and the phylum Echinodermata eventually became one of the major groups of marine animals that continues to thrive today. The ancestors of modern echinoderms—such as sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers—can largely be traced back to the early Paleozoic. During that time, echinoderms evolved at a remarkable pace. Within only a few tens of millions of years, they underwent extensi

（Stocktrek Images via Getty Images） In 1955, an American amateur fossil collector, Francis Tully, obtained a peculiar fossil from the Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois. Intrigued by its unusual form, he brought the specimen to the Field Museum of Natural History for identification. The paleontologists there were immediately puzzled. The fossil preserved an organism with a cigar-shaped body, a triangular tail fin, and a pair of eyes mounted on a long horizontal stalk. Most b