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As pieces of fossils steadily flow from the ground to museums and institutions worldwide, studies on old specimens are just as important as the new ones. Century-old collections often yield untold stories, lying in wait for someone to sit down and uncover their secrets.

In Yellowstone National Park, gray wolves have been recorded risking injury and death to help pack mates escape during aggressive attacks by neighboring packs. Why would any wild animal take such a risk? This ability to relate to another’s pain and distress, to feel empathy, is rarely attributed to any creature except for modern humans. While we cannot know the details of the lives of past Homo sapiens such as hunter-gatherers, we can look to gray wolves and think about just how much we had – hopefully still have – in common.

North America's Late Cretaceous dinosaur fauna is familiar and well studied. The dinosaurs unearthed from the North Slope of Alaska are at once familiar, but also unique, and preserve evidence of troodontids twice the size of their contemporaries from Montana and Alberta.