The Great Sphinx has been without a nose for centuries. Now a fossil crocodile skull taken from the same rock turns out to be missing the tip of its snout too. The coincidence has put a name on a species science did not know it had, Herugavialis cairensis, which spent almost a hundred years in […]
Finding fossils usually means months of fieldwork, a hammer, and a lot of patience. In Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost region, it took none of that. According to the University of Cambridge, a cluster of rocks had broken loose from a cliff above a sheep field. When they split open on landing, they exposed a fossil of […]
In 2016, paleontologist David DeMar Jr. was crawling across a rocky outcrop in northeastern Montana, hunting for fish fossils, when he spotted a dark, reddish-brown nodule about half the size of a golf ball. He picked it up and looked at it through his hand lens. On its surface was something he didn’t expect: a […]