http://cache.io9.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png http://io9.com/tag/fossils http://io9.com/tag/fossils

While a huge amount of research has examined how plants and animals looked in the prehistoric past, we know extremely little about what these creatures would have sounded like (Dr. Alan Grant's 3D-printed raptor voice box in Jurassic Park 3 notwithstanding). But now, we finally have some idea of one noise that would have pierced the primeval woodlands 165 million years ago. More »
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Nebraska's Hastings Museum recently commissioned Staab Studios to build a model of a bony prehistoric predator from the genus Xiphactinus. Staab helpfully recorded their progress sculpting this beast in silent repose. If you ever need to build an extinct underwater horror for your rumpus room, this video is a good place to start. More »
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Paleontologists recently spotted a suspiciously bare patch of land on a Brazilian farm on Google Maps, and they headed out to dig for fossils. This terrifying-looking creature, a dog-sized predator that ruled 260 million years ago, is the awesome result. More »
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Want to vacation like a scientific explorer would? We've put together the ultimate travel guide for people who want to journey back to the earliest ages of the Earth. This guide to North American prehistory will take you to valleys full of fossils, mountains carved by ice ages, and petrified forests that are millions of years old.

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Anomalocaris is one of the weirdest and fiercest creatures from the Cambrian period, when multicellular life first evolved over 600 million years ago. With its circular, serrated mouth, giant eyes on stalks, spiked arms, and body-spanning fins, this two-meter-long creature was at the top of the food chain in the Earth's ancient seas. More »
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A team of Russian and Japanese scientists recently announced that they have discovered pristine DNA samples of woolly mammoths, and they will clone a living mammoth within five years. It's tremendously exciting...but almost certainly not going to happen. Here's why. More »
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Situated more than half a mile from the ocean, atop a hill in Chile's notoriously arid Atacama desert, an international team of scientists has made an incredible discovery. Over 80 extraordinarily well-preserved whale and marine mammal fossils, many of them positioned just meters apart from one another, have been found gathered on a small patch of land that as recently as 2010 was destined to become a highway. More »
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Though fossils can reveal many things about the paleolithic world, they can also lie. Case in point: The blue-tinged fossils of an ancient ancestor of the forester moth (pictured). For years, scientists believed these fossils meant the 47 million-year-old moths had blue wings. But a new analysis by physicists has revealed that the truth is a lot stranger. Find out how the moths' true colors were revealed. More »
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Jurassic Park taught us that we could find insects trapped in ancient amber and analyze them — but what about the insects on top of the insects? Much like Swift's famous poem, there's a whole different layer of creatures living on top of the ones we know about, which have been too small to analyze. But now with a new technique called phase contrast X-ray computed tomography, scientists have managed to scan and analyze a mite on the head of a spider preserved in amber. The mite is just 0.2mm long. More »
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After a dead whale falls to the bottom of the ocean, thousands of marine organisms will carve out a home in its carcass. Among these corpse squatters are the Osedax, a genus of marine worms that bores into whales' bones and feed on the delicious cetacean fats inside. More »
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Researchers say this specimen is about as close to perfect as fossils come. Unveiled yesterday by scientists from the Bavarian paleontological and ecological collections (BSPF) in Munich, Germany, the unnamed dinosaur is believed to be 98% complete, and even includes bits of preserved skin. More »
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Piltdown Man, a fossil that supposedly proved early humans originated in England, was discovered in 1912, and wasn't proven a hoax until 1953. This fraud was one of the earliest fossil hoaxes out there — but it was actually two centuries too late to claim that distinction. More »
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The Earth was a very different place 3.5 billion years ago. In the absence of oxygen, many scientists believe Earth's earliest ecosystems survived on sulphur, but researchers have long been unable to find any proof of this hypothesis, in the form of fossilized microbial life. More »
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In 1987, Charles Bonner discovered the fossilised bones of a large sea reptile on his family ranch. It was a flipper-limbed plesiosaur, probably Polycotylus, and one of many such fossils recovered from Logan County in Kansas. But this specimen was special – there was a smaller one inside it. This plesiosaur was pregnant. More »
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Two 400-million-year-old fossil plants are the oldest known examples of wood. They are small herbs, suggesting that wood did not evolve to help plants grow tall. More »
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Everyone knows that the footprints of prehistoric creatures are rare, and that their fossilized remains are even rarer. But finding footprints and fossils together is almost never heard of, which is what has paleontologists so worked up about the fossilized Protoceratops pictured here. Outlined by a white box is a footprint that paleontologists say closely matches the left foot of a Protoceratops. The question is: does the footprint in question actually belong to this Protoceratops? More »
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Scientists have found fossils of an early insect that seems to have the body parts from many different types of today's insects. It represents an evolutionary conundrum. More »
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The fossil of one of the biggest ants ever has been discovered in Wyoming. Over fifty milliion years ago, it crossed the arctic to get there. Scientists have analyzed the data, and believe that a hot planet fosters the spread of super-sized ants. More »
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This fossil was found in the sandstones of southern Massachusetts, and is the oldest known full-body impression of a flying bug. It's there on the left, and you can see the distinct impressions made by its six legs, as it struggled to escape from the mud it got stuck in before being fossilized. Formed approximately 300 million years ago, this cast is the most ancient evidence of the Pterygota subclass of insects, and is thought to be the distant antecedent of the mayfly. More »
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Using new infrared light techniques, scientists have at last been able to analyze the chemical composition of a piece of lizard skin, preserved for millions of years in dry rock. So what did these reptiles look like in pre-human times? More »
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635 million years ago, almost the entire planet was a frozen ball of ice. And yet mere tens of millions of years later a population explosion happened deep underwater in South China, preceding the better-known Cambrian explosion by a significant time period. In these oxygen-free waters, more than 3,000 fossils of 15 species of seaweeds and worms lived briefly, and then all died suddenly. More »
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A fossilized pterodactyl, found in China, has provided the first direct confirmation of the differences between male and female pterodactyls. The new fossil, a female, has been nicknamed Mrs. T. More »
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The world is losing monsters left and right. First the T-Rex went vegetarian and turned into a bird, and now it looks like giant, ancient sea scorpions might have eaten only greens as well. More »
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The scientific community has debated whether or not pterosaurs could fly for years. A new theory suggests that these winged creatures may have pole vaulted on their own wings to get airborne. More »
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500 million years ago, the meter-long Anomalocaris roamed the Cambrian seas. Researchers once thought that Anomalocaris crushed trilobites with their teeth, but recent fossil analysis suggests something a lot stranger. More »
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A newly discovered penguin fossil reveals a bird twice as big as an Emperor penguin and with colors radically different from the familiar black and white features all modern penguins share...but this Water King was already the perfect swimming bird. More »
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Find a way to guarantee that in ten thousand years your fossilized bones will be prodded at by lab-coat-wearing beings who are taller and have better teeth and prehensile tails. More »
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Researchers have discovered 650-to-640 million-year-old sponge fossils at Australia's Flinders Ranges. These fossils predate the oldest known animal fossils by 90 million years and antecede the blossoming of life during the Cambrian Explosion ~524 million years ago. More »
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Drakozoon was a blob-like creature that lived in the oceans during the Silurian Period, some 425 million years ago. It was known from only a single fossil - until researchers sliced and diced their specimen to create this 3D model. More »
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In a far-off future, archeologists could trace the post-human history of the world by examining the fosilized remains of gynoids and cyborg cats. Creatures of the Mechazoic Era imagines what they might find when the Singularity is a distant memory. More »
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In the following essay, Greg Laden muses on the glacial pace it takes for geological theories to be widely accepted and the difficulty of pinpointing exactly when the dinosaurs went extinct. More »
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Before sediment buried it, this Sanajeh indicus was about to devour a baby titanosaur. 67 million years later, paleontologists unearthed this fossilized scene of an 11-foot-long snake hunting what would grow up to to be a 75-foot sauropod. Gulp. More »
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2009 saw plenty of scientific discoveries — 44-million-year-old hominid Ardi, water on the moon — but some of what we learned wasn't as awesome as we'd hoped. LiveScience takes a look at the news that caused scientific controversy this year. More »
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Dinosaurs may not have been the most fearsome creatures to stalk the Saharan plains. Paleontologists have discovered fossils of several crocodile species that indicate some crocs galloped upright on land, some were enormous, and some literally ate dinosaurs for breakfast. More »
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Humanity has a new older sister. A fossilized skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus or "Ardi" predates Lucy by over a million years. The discovery has led to new insights about human evolution, suggesting previously unknown relationships to our chimpanzee brethren. More »
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It's no secret that many scientists are great fans of science fiction, and sometimes tributes to characters and authors end up in their work. We list 30 species, alive and extinct, that bear scifi-themed names. More »
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When scientists look at ancient fossils, we usually only see flat, sketchy outlines of the creatures they are investigating. But a team at Imperial College London has turned an ancient fossil of a spider into an amazing 3D model. More »
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Some insects and sea creatures produce sperm that is up to 10 times bigger than they are. Now scientists have used an innovative new x-ray technology to show how this bizarre situation evolved over hundreds of millions of years. More »
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Meet Ida, the 47 million year old fossil who may represent one of our earliest known ancestors. She's probably the most complete primate fossil ever discovered, and she explains where humans (and lemurs) come from. More »
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Paleontologists have discovered fossil remains of the world's biggest snake, which was 13 meters long (over twice as big as this giant anaconda, pictured). Though they lived 60 million years ago, such snakes could re-evolve. More »
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