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Archaeopteryx is the fossil that proved Darwin right. It's the oldest known fossil bird, and it helps show that all birds— including the ones alive today—are dinosaurs. And while the first Archaeopteryx fossil was found more than 160 years ago, scientists…

New discoveries of fossil clawed footprints from Australia, published in Nature, push the origin of reptiles back in time by at least 35 million years and change the entire timeline for the origin of tetrapods (backboned land animals).

With coral reefs in crisis due to climate change, scientists have engineered a bio-ink that could help promote coral larvae settlement and restore these underwater ecosystems before it's too late. In a paper published in Trends in Biotechnology, researchers…

The residents of a California town are raising the alarm after dozens of birds appear to have exploded without explanation.

A new study published in Palaeontology has confirmed that X-ray computed tomography (XCT scanning) can be used to monitor decomposing organisms without altering the natural decay process—a vital step in understanding how fossils form.

Newly discovered evidence of Australia's earliest species of tree frog challenges what we know about when Australian and South American frogs parted ways on the evolutionary tree.

The world's seagrasses possess a remarkable ability to capture and store vast amounts of carbon, according to a global study published in Nature Communications.

A recent study led by Prof. Li Yaoming from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has identified significant imbalances in farmland ecosystem services (FESs) across Central Asia, posing substantial challenges…

Sun filters through dense stands of cycads and conifers of Gondwana, where a lithe, bipedal predator slowly moves through the Upper Triassic undergrowth. Standing just over a meter tall and measuring about two meters from snout to tail, Maleriraptor kuttyi…

A new study of wild Sumatran orangutans by researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior (MPI-AB) has found that mothers consistently differ in their maternal behaviors toward their infants, even after controlling for biological, social, and…

It wouldn't make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out their habitat.

When biting into a chili pepper, you expect a fiery sensation on your tongue. This spiciness is detected because of capsaicinoid compounds. But for some peppers, despite high levels of capsaicinoids, the heat is mysteriously dull.

A dinosaur's 40-second journey more than 120 million years ago has been brought back to life by a University of Queensland-led research team using advanced digital modeling techniques.

Global warming is already very tough for animals in the wild, but it may be toughest for creatures like fish, whose body temperatures are controlled by the water temperatures around them.

A Brazilian scientist who pushed back against chemical fertilizers and researched biologically based approaches to more robust food production has been honored with this year's World Food Prize, the organization announced Tuesday.

Scientists studying chimpanzees in Budongo Forest, Uganda, have observed that these primates don't just treat their own injuries, but care for others, too—information which could shed light on how our ancestors first began treating wounds and using medicines.

Paleontologists at the Manitoba Museum and Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) have discovered a remarkable new 506-million-year-old predator from the Burgess Shale of Canada. The results are announced in a paper in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

About 3.7 billion years ago, a string of naturally occurring amino—the same kind that astronomers have found in meteorites and just recently in a stellar nursery near the center of the Milky Way—reacted with a naturally occurring catalyst and began the…

Obsessive compulsive disorder has many unknowns, including what causes it, why symptoms can differ so much between people, how medication and therapy for it actually work, and why treatment is effective for some people and not for others. In our research,…

In Biology 101, we learn that RNA is a single, ribbon-like strand of base pairs that is copied from our DNA and then read like a recipe to build a protein. But there's more to the story. Some RNA strands fold into complex shapes that allow them to drive…