david.costa.art/Shutterstock
New research shows that placental mammals survived the mass extinction that killed the
dinosaurs.
The spiky branches of a monkey puzzle tree.
Joshua Bruce Allen/Shutterstock
The arrangement of leaves on most plants follows a mathematical pattern – new research sheds light on how it evolved.
Katrina Kenny
Researchers have found an armoured fossil skink 1,000 times heavier than the ones in your garden. Its closest living relative is the shingleback lizard.
Kira Westaway
New evidence from contested Laos cave site shows humans reached Southeast Asia at least 68,000 years ago.
Dendrolagus goodfelowi, or Goodfellow’s tree-kangaroo.
Shutterstock
The ancestors of kangaroos once lived in the trees – but their evolutionary history is murky. Here’s everything we know so far.
Virtual Australian Museum of Palaeontology
Digital scanning offers a new window on Australia’s unique fossil history, from early multicellular lifeforms to gigantic ‘marsupial lions’.
Jacob van Zoelen
Having special foot adaptations helped these sizeable animals wander long distances, which meant a better chance to find plentiful food and water.
Life reconstruction of an Australian pterosaur.
Peter Trusler
In the dinosaur era, flying reptiles soared in the skies of what is now Australia – but we have barely any fossil records of them.
The oldest known footprint of our species, lightly ringed with chalk. It appears long and narrow because the trackmaker dragged their heel.
Charles Helm
This was an area in which early anatomically modern humans survived, evolved and thrived, before spreading out of Africa to other continents.
Ancient DNA preserved in the tooth tartar of human fossils encodes microbial metabolites that could be the next antibiotic.
Werner/Siemens Foundation
Ancient microbes likely produced natural products their descendants today do not. Tapping into this lost chemical diversity could offer a potential source of new drugs.
Soil was key to making the Earth habitable.
EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo
What fossil records tell us about when the Earth was first covered by plants.
An ape that lived 21 million years ago was used to a habitat that was both grassy and wooded.
Corbin Rainbolt
Contrary to the idea that apes evolved their upright posture to reach for fruit in the forest canopy, the earliest known ape with this stature, Morotopithecus, lived in more open grassy environments.
Life reconstruction of the head of the Australian sauropod Diamantinasaurus matildae.
Elena Marian
Meet Ann: a toothy 95 million-year-old Diamantinasaurus from outback Queensland.
Heavier than a modern lion, these big cats were fearsome predators.
Daniel Eskridge/Stocktrek Images via Getty Images
Researchers are analyzing the fossil cranium of a Smilodon fatalis that lived more than 13,000 years ago to learn more about the lifestyle of this iconic big cat.
Dinosaurs once dominated Earth’s landscapes.
AmeliAU/Shutterstock
Hollow bones were essential for dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex.
An illustration of two giant Cape zebras alongside a much smaller plains zebra.
Maggie Newman
It hasn’t been clear how common the species was on the Cape south coast because its body fossils are predominantly from southern Africa’s west coast.
Dynatoaetus gaffae was twice the size of the wedge-tailed eagle we know today.
Mike Lee
At twice the size of a wedge-tailed eagle, the newly discovered Dynatoaetus gaffae would have competed with thylacines and Tasmanian devils for prey.
Gifford Miller
The largest birds that ever lived on Earth, elephant birds have a spotty fossil record. But understanding them could help protect Madagascar’s biodiversity.
Maybe the first life on Earth was part of an ‘RNA world.’
Artur Plawgo/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
Fossil evidence of how the earliest life on Earth came to be is hard to come by. But scientists have come up with a few theories based on the microbes, viruses and prions existing today.
The building blocks of the Giza pyramids contain trillions of fossilised remains of an ocean-dwelling organism called foraminifera.
Sui Xiankai/Xinhua via Getty Images
Fossils aren’t just pieces of the past that allow scientists to look backwards. They can play a role in modern policy decision-making, too.