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Brachiosaurus is estimated to have weighed close to thirty metric tons. Put two of these behemoths together, and you're dealing with upwards of 125,000 pounds of dinosaur. More »
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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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Scientists at the University of Missouri have made an incredible prehistoric discovery. A sizable skull fragment, recently uncovered after spending several years hidden away in storage, actually belonged to a gigantic species of ancient crocodile. This finding is unlike anything the researchers have ever seen. More »
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Remember the dilapidated roadside dinosaurs located near Arizona's Petrified Forest National Park? Believe it or not, those aren't the only prehistoric abominations this country has to offer. More »
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Although a few dinosaurs were adapted to live underwater, most dinosaurs were landlubbers through and through. And perhaps no dinosaur had less business going for a swim that this fellow, the heavily-armored, 13,000-pound Ankylosaurus. More »
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If you can't spot it in the image up top, try clicking through for the hi-res. You'll know it when you see it. More »
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Scientists have found a way to uncover feathered dinosaurs' true colors, and one of the first creatures to come under inspection is none other than Archaeopteryx — an iconic but mysterious theropod believed by many to be the "missing link" between dinosaurs and birds. More »
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What's the only thing better than dinosaurs? That would be baby dinosaurs. Paleontologists working in South Africa have made an incredible discovery in the region's Golden Gate Highlands National Park: 10 nests thought to belong to the herbivorous dinosaur Massospondylus, a forbear of massive sauropods like Brachiosaurus. More »
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Drop what you're doing — this is more important. Oregon sculptor Jud Turner has built a life-sized model of a Columbia mammoth skeleton, he's done it with 95% recycled materials (mostly old farming equipment and agricultural tools), and it's probably the most jaw-droppingly bad-ass thing I've ever laid my eyes on. 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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The fossils were lost, and nobody even knew it. For ages, a stockpile of over 300 specimens — including several collected by Charles Darwin on his historic Voyage of the Beagle — has been changing hands throughout England, hidden away inside a nondescript cabinet. More »
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Millions of years ago, Europe was a vast savanna full of giraffes, elephants, and rhinos. There was also at least one hominid ape, according to a fossilized tooth recently discovered in Bulgaria. Meet the latest complication in our evolutionary story. More »
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In a manner of speaking, yes, Bigfoot did exist — although, perhaps not in the way many modern day cryptid enthusiasts surmise. In a piece written for Smithsonian's Hominid Hunting, Erin Wayman serves up the facts on Gigantopithecus — the car-sized quadruped that went extinct long before humans ever speculated about the existence of a big, hairy, man-like ape. More »
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This kid is so impressive, you're liable to lose sight of how adorable she is. Watch as Stella, a four-year-old dinosaur expert, goes through a list of why the toy in her hand is not a Triceratops, but a Styracosaurus. More »
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Sabertoothed cats weren't just modern cats with huge freaking teeth. They also had immense and muscular forelimbs. In fact, there were a number of other large-toothed carnivores beyond the smilodon, and new research by Julie Meachen, a paleontologist at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, NC, shows that they all might have had big, strong forelimbs too. More »
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The fossil you see here was found in Doushantuo, China, one of the world's richest fossil formations. It looks like grains of sand, but nobody is sure what it actually is, whether it's animal, bacteria, or something even weirder. More »
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From law-violating subatomic particles to entirely new, earth-like worlds, 2011 was an incredible year for scientific discovery. In the past 12 months, scientific breakthroughs in fields ranging from archaeology to structural biochemistry have allowed humanity to rewrite history, and enabled us to open to brand new chapters in our development as a species. 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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Rapetosaurus was a huge, plant-eating dinosaur much like the brachiosaurus. It's one of a family of dinosaurs that had a huge, hollow bone growing in its back. Known as an osteoderm, paleontologists are only now discovering what it was for. More »
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From London to the Middle East riots have shaken political stability. Are the answers to be found in human nature? More »
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Humanity language is the result of some dramatic evolutionary changes over the last few million years, which have reshaped our old primate vocal organs into the more sophisticated organs we use today. So what did all this change sound like? 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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The rise of agriculture allowed for the development of complex societies and technologies that likely wouldn't have been possible otherwise. It also wreaked havoc on human health. And we can add a new downside to the list: our misshapen mouths. More »
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How the dinosaurs died is maybe the most well-known story in all paleontology, but the dinosaurs' origins are more obscure. Dinosaurs might well have gotten their chance to rule the planet from the very thing that later killed them off. 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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Dinosaurs ruled Earth for 160 million years, but they didn't get that way by running everywhere. What little we can tell about dinosaur anatomy suggests they could barely run at all. But they could power walk...thanks to their muscular rumps. 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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Many of the creatures that lived in the seas half a billion years ago were far too soft to leave behind many fossils. But their footprints remain, and one of the most striking finds is a giant, predatory sea millipede. More »
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How did mammoths grow up? It's a simple question, but one that has been difficult to answer. Much of what paleontologists know about the great Ice Age beasts come from teeth, bones, and comparisons to living elephants, but our knowledge of their early lives has been restricted by a lack of well-preserved mammoth calves. Now that has changed. More »
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Antarctica's frigid climate can make hunting for fossils incredibly difficult. So difficult, in fact, that until 1986, no one had recovered so much as a single dinosaur specimen from the continent's icy grip. 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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What is it about Jurassic Park that continues to capture the public's imagination, even almost two decades after its theatrical release? Dinosaur Tracking's Brian Switek weighs in on the enduring cultural significance of Jurassic Park, why the sequels failed to live up to the original, and how Jurassic Park IV could play a huge role in overhauling society's perception of dinosaurs. More »
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How dinosaurs spent their lives remains a great mystery of paleontology. We know they ate a lot, and presumably they had sex somehow. But it's almost impossible to prove the existence of more complex dinosaur behaviors...until now. More »
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Even if we can't observe how fast dinosaurs ran in real life (at least for now), there's nothing that says we can't do our damnedest to figure it out experimentally. After all, if dinosaurs do make their big comeback, questions like "how fast do they run?" and "wait a minute...how fast can I run?" are precisely what you'll want answered. More »
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Triceratops has captured the public imagination ever since the first fossils were discovered in 1887. But it's hardly the only horned dinosaur that once roamed the Earth. Meet the two-horned zuniceratops, oldest of the American relatives of triceratops. More »
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The sprawling frame of Archaeopteryx is one of the most widely-recognized images from the world of paleontology, yet fewer than a dozen specimens of the iconic "first bird" have been unearthed since the the species was first discovered in 1861. More »
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Paleontologists recently discovered rodent teeth in Peru dating back over 41 million years, making them the oldest evidence of rodents in the Americas. But despite its location, this rodent was far more closely related to today's African, not American, rodents. More »
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