From the depths of time, from the Hell Creek Formation, the last of the hook-handed dinosaurs emerged: Captain Hook … from the Prairie. This fearsome creature had a snout full of teeth and large, viciously hooked claws. But each claw sat at the end of the most ridiculously short, stubby …
Read More »Massive predatory dolphins that once terrorized Earth’s oceans
Scientists have identified an almost complete skeleton of a 4.8-meter-long dolphin ancestor that lived in what is now South Carolina during the Oligocene epoch about 25 million years ago. This ‘dolphin’ was the first known echolocation apex predator: in addition to its large size, it would have had large, tusk-like …
Read More »Scientists create a ‘time tree’ that shows how flowering plants came to dominate Earth
Today, flowering plants (or angiosperms) represent about four-fifths of all green plants on Earth, but for billions of years they did not exist at all. Biologists have now been able to fully record the rapid increase in angiosperms in the past 140 million years. A recently released ‘time tree’ of …
Read More »Gigantic marine scorpions, some larger than humans, hunted in ancient oceans
Let’s go back the hands of time. Before the extinction knocked dinosaurs off their pillar, before the extinction “Great Death” wiped out 95 percent of all organisms, we had the Paleozoic Era. During this age in Earth’s history, between 541 million and 252 million years ago, arthropods (animals with exoskeletons …
Read More »The dazzling colors of insects have been preserved in Myanmar amber for 99 million years
When you think about the color scheme that the prehistoric world of dinosaurs looks like, greens and browns usually come to mind. But more and more research has shown that millions of years ago, vibrant, vibrant colors were everywhere in nature, just as they are today. The latest evidence: 99-million-year-old …
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