Franz Anthony

A study involving slices of bones from South America’s extinct marine sloth reveals how their body adapted to the underwater environment.

A Brazilian spinosaur’s leg bone shows aquatic adaptation ten million years before Morocco’s iconic Spinosaurus.

From Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to Disney’s Ursula and Nintendo’s Splatoon, squid and their squad continue to captivate people throughout the ages. They’re survivors, both in nature and in human consciousness. Over the course of 500 million years of their history, cephalopods have left us plenty of traces of their presence.

By comparing 286 different animals, living and extinct, researchers have identified traits that seem related to the appearance of weaponized tail.

Comparing a Late Carboniferous fossil locality in Portugal with its North American and European counterparts shows how plants dispersed and diversified during Pangaea’s early days.

Bats’ echolocation seems like a mysterious, stealthy weapon to us. But to moths, they are a siren of death, loud as a jet engine. As the moths adapt to disrupt the bat’s sonar, the graceful aerial hunter has moved its dining table closer to the ground.

It’s hard to imagine a life without a jaw—we need one to eat and interact with one another through speech. Yet like every other part in our body, it didn’t always exist back in life’s evolutionary history.

Over 20 specimens of Ichthyosaurus from the 1700s and 1800s were misidentified due to fabricated body parts. A study suggests they belong to a sister genus, Protoichthyosaurus.

Ichthyosaurs, meaning ‘fish lizards’, are a bizarre group of ancient marine reptiles that went extinct around 90 million years ago. They looked suspiciously similar to dolphins, but are only very, very distantly related to the modern mammals. They captivated the attention of scientists and the public alike due to numerous discoveries by Victorian palaeontologist, Mary Anning, who collected dozens of skeletons from the Dorset coast in the UK.

Fossils as we know them are preserved remains that rarely tell the full story of the creatures that lived in the past. Softer details like skin, feathers, or internal tissues are typically lost due to decomposition. Follow paleontologist Mary Schweitzer as she discovered how soft tissues were preserved inside a dinosaur bone for tens of millions of years.

Throughout Earth’s history, some animals were thought to have gone completely extinct — only to show up again alive and well. This video by PBS Eons covers what scientists call Lazarus taxa. These groups of animals seem to “cheat death” by eluding our detection after their presumed extinction.

One fossil dinosaur from China shows that modern asymmetrical feathers, normally associated with flight, also evolved in grounded dinosaur groups.

While sea scorpions are not true scorpions, they might have weaponized their tail like one. One fossil with a curved tail suggests how they might have moved their tail around.

Unlike its turkey-sized Mongolian cousin Velociraptor, Utahraptor is an elusive beast. Despite people's great interest in them, dromaeosaur fossils are pretty scarce in North America. The secrets of the raptors, however, may lie hidden inside a slab of sandstone. It is not an exaggeration to call this block one of the most important dinosaur discoveries ever.

One dinosaur discovered in Argentina was found with a gut full of toxic seeds. This discovery offers researchers an insight on how dinosaurs and plants depended on each other for survival.

Beavers, bees, birds, it is known that many members of the animal kingdom build intricate structures as a part of their life cycle. But what about spiders?

For ages, life on Earth and its origin has been a big fascination for mankind. The ancestry of most animals can be traced back to 541 million years ago – when an event called the Cambrian Explosion abruptly birthed a myriad of familiar creatures in the sea. It was a time when the ancestors of crabs, clams, and jellyfishes dominated the oceans. Little did people know, there was a time before the Cambrian where life looked like nothing that exists today.

With holiday season coming up, science-themed gifts have started popping up all over the internet. Meet the siblings behind Permia, who aim to spread their love of paleontology through their line of apparel.

Two decades after its birth, Pokémon continues to draw inspiration from an extensive array of fossil animals.

One trap-jaw ant from 99 million-year-old Burmese amber is found with an elaborate head structure, specialized to trap oversized prey.

Roughly 252 million years ago, occurred the most severe mass extinction known to ever happen on Earth. The event, likely caused by multiple meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, and the subsequent climate change, devastated more than half of species living at that time.

The horned dinosaur group of ceratopsians is known for their elaborate head ornamentation. One new species from Utah is remarkable for its two peculiarly forward-curving spikes on the far end of its frills.

It is an image familiar to anyone involved in paleontology: a dinosaur fossil, discovered with neck arched backwards – nearly touching the body, and mouth wide open.

Dozens of fossilized whales, seals, aquatic sloths, and other marine animals have been found in an ancient tidal flat in northern Chile.

The evolution of novel traits such as wings, flowers, horns, or limbs, is known to be important to drive biodiversity. However, it is not easy to understand how such changes happen at the genetic level.

Playing dead is a common defense behavior in several animal species. When threatened, some animals will stay still to avoid predation.

Mariana Trench of the Pacific is known to be deepest part of the world’s oceans. As with many other unexplored corners of the oceans, the poorly studied area has so much to reveal to visiting scientists.

Mammoths, among the largest proboscideans to ever roam the northern hemisphere, hailed from modern day’s Africa. The giants branched out from the relatively smaller African mammoth (Mammuthus africanavus), and adapted to live in many different environments.

For peacocks, a successful courtship requires more than an oversized appendage. The well-endowed males of the avian world need to know how to work the spectacle.

Tritylodontids—a small, highly specialized group of animals, were previously thought to had gone extinct in Late Jurassic, as they shared the same niche with the more adaptable early mammals.

Baby animals, out of all things, are known for their characteristic proportions. One infant dinosaur fossil was found to resemble its adult form.

It is a common idea that an asteroid impact spelled the doom for most non-avian dinosaurs at the end of Late Cretaceous. In the past two decades, researchers are shifting the question to how birds managed to survive the calamity.

Following last month’s report of the reef’s most severe bleaching ever recorded, Australian scientists have just revealed the full extent of the damage today.

It has been a regular in the hood since it was a chick. Last week, it boldly went where no cassowary has gone before.

Over 201 million years ago, lifeforms in late Triassic period faced a great change, causing the fourth known mass extinction which eliminated more than 70% of species existing at that time.

Somewhere in the Merendon mountains of northwest Honduras, shrouded by the clouds, exists a region noted for its richness in plants and animal species.

New Zealand’s flightless national bird is far from helpless. The males are known to be territorial, and will fiercely defend their turf.

Frog eggs are typically known for their distinctive gelatinous appearance and the large quantity they are laid in. The mimic poison frogs (Ranitomeya imitator), however, decided to trade in numbers in exchange for parental care.

Previously found only in deeper waters, one new species of zombie worm is found in the temperate, shallow waters off the coast of Spain. This finding expands current knowledge of the peculiar worms’ lifestyle and diversity.

It’s dead, it’s a –saur, it’s a dinosaur. Or is it? An extinct animal’s true identity is not always what it says on the tin. Without understanding the basic relationship between extinct reptiles, it’s easy to fall prey to the false impression their names bring.

These dragons, clad with armors of spine-like projections, can produce hydrogen cyanide to repel unwanted intruders.

In 2002, the Iberian lynx was declared the most endangered cat in the world. Recent census shows the highest number of cats recorded since.

Ethinyl estradiol (EE2), a synthetic estrogen commonly used in birth control pills, may be found polluting water bodies. Male frogs exposed to the compound might undergo sex reversal, threatening reproduction rate in the long run.

Just like every other organism on earth, Pachycephalosaurus started out tiny. And just like most other dinosaurs known to the general public, it is associated with the adult specimens of the animal. It doesn’t help that remains of Pachycephalosaurus and its relatives are often fragmentary, complicating efforts to identify and classify the dinosaurs.

One lucky bird’s narrow escape from its hunter refines our knowledge about predatory behavior in Late Cretaceous waters. Researchers matched the bite marks with a predator’s teeth to figure out how it all happened.

The 300-million-year-old enigma looks like a sci-fi squid with claw. Scientists have finally figured out its place on the tree of life.

The genus Rafflesia is widely known for at least two reasons—its gigantic bloom and repulsive stench. One newly discovered member of the group is the smallest of its kind and gives off a fruity fragrance.

Smaller than a grain of rice, it’s easy to overlook this creature. Despite its resemblance, the microwhip scorpion is not a true scorpion, although it is indeed an arachnid.

The limbs of the earliest four-legged vertebrates from 360 million years ago were not as structurally diverse as previously thought.

One study suggests that the uneventful decline of crocodyliforms coincided with the diversification of modern marine turtles.

For more than 100 million years, a group of fish-like reptiles called ichthyosaurs dwelled the oceans of the Mesozoic. They were among the earliest reptiles to dominate the seas when they diversified in the early Triassic.

While filter feeding nowadays is seen in many invertebrates, fish and sharks, the fossil record of this feeding behavior is patchy. The discovery of two more skulls add to the diversity of animals that swam through the Mesozoic oceans like a whale shark.

Throughout most of the Mesozoic, the seas were inhabited by various groups of marine reptiles, one of them being the long-necked plesiosaurs. One sub-group of the reptiles called the pliosaurs, known for their relatively shorter necks, were apex predators during the Middle to Late Jurassic.

Approximately 201.3 million years ago the Triassic Period ended, taking most of the large land animals with it in a large extinction event. This mass extinction kickstarted the Jurassic Period and the diversification of dinosaurs, which spread out to fill the niches emptied by the extinction.

These gigantic stick insects, once a common species on its home land, were wiped out in just two years by an invasive species. 80 years later, the last living population of the species is discovered in an unlikely place across the waters.

The gigantic salmon, reaching 2 meters (6.5 ft) in length and weighing just shy of half a ton, had teeth that resembled a saber-toothed cat. Or so they thought.

In Late Cretaceous Asia and Western North America lived a group of smaller relatives of the horned dinosaurs, otherwise known as ceratopsians. Members of the primitive group of Leptoceratopsidae only grew to 2 m (6.5 ft) each, had no horns, and sported smaller frills than their better-known counterparts.

Naming a new species is a serious business. Each given name has to be unique, descriptive, and follow certain “grammatical” rules. Despite the strict rules regarding the naming of new organisms, some scientists find ways to geek out on the job.

A brinicle is a finger-like formation that grows underneath sea ice. The formation process of this ‘ice finger of death’ has been captured for the first time on camera.

Giraffes are one of the world’s most iconic animals, thanks to their unusually long neck. It is a trait not seen in another living member of the family Giraffidae, the okapi. One fossil animal from the island of Samos, Greece, had a neck that is somewhere in-between its living relatives.

With an estimated weight of 10 metric tons, this giant herbivore is the largest animal ever found in South Africa’s Karoo.

Seven species of giant rats from East Timor have been discovered by a team of archeologists. The largest one grew ten times as big as modern-day rats.

About 270 million years ago, life on land flourished in high-latitude regions following the continental glaciation in the Late Carboniferous. Despite 150 years of study, however, the origin of this diversification is unclear. New fossil discoveries from northeastern Brazil shed a light on this mystery.

It all started in mid '90s when Nathan Myhrvold, a computer scientist, wondered if the tails of Diplodocid sauropods could have made a cracking noise similar to a bullwhip.

One study explains how 270 million years ago, two different mammal relatives could have exhibited interspecies combat behaviors similar to today’s deer.

An in-depth study of fossils from Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, has revealed temperature fluctuation and unstable environment during the Triassic Period. This likely prevented the diversification of larger dinosaurs until 30 million years after their appearance.

Three newly unearthed vertebrae from north-central Texas suggest the presence of an enormous shark during the Early Cretaceous Period in the region. This discovery provides further evidence that larger sharks had evolved prior to the Late Cretaceous.

Nanuqsaurus hoglundi, the “polar bear lizard”, is barely two-thirds the size of Tyrannosaurus rex. It is the only tyrannosaur ever found outside temperate regions.