Textbooks on biology and forestry make it clear that large parts of Europe would naturally be covered by dense forests.

As the primary element of life on our planet, carbon is constantly journeying from living creatures down into the Earth's crust and back up into the atmosphere, but until recently, quantifying this journey was virtually impossible.

New dates provide detailed insights into the timing of events in the ancient city of Gezer, according to a study published November 15, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Lyndelle Webster of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and colleague

In the geological past, several groups of crocodiles evolved towards a morphology adapted to marine life. However, the extent of these adaptations and their evolutionary trajectories remained unknown. An exhaustive study of their morphology by a scientifi

Once a favored food of grazing dinosaurs, an ancient lineage of plants called cycads helped sustain these and other prehistoric animals during the Mesozoic Era, starting 252 million years ago, by being plentiful in the forest understory. Today, just a few

The story of Ekgmowechashala, the final primate to inhabit North America before Homo sapiens or Clovis people, reads like a spaghetti western: A grizzled and mysterious loner, against the odds, ekes out an existence on the American Plains.

The discovery of 27 avian footprints on the southern Australia coast -- dating back to the Early Cretaceous when Australia was still connected to Antarctica -- opens another window onto early avian evolution and possible migratory behavior.

A new study has cast doubt on claims that Homo naledi, a small-brained hominin dating to between 335-241,000 years ago, deliberately buried their dead and produced rock art in Rising Star Cave, South Africa.

The hunter-gatherers who settled on the banks of the Haine, a river in southern Belgium, 31,000 years ago were already using spearthrowers to hunt their game. This is the finding of a new study conducted at TraceoLab at the University of Liège. The

A research team from the University of Cologne, in collaboration with colleagues from the Leibniz Institute for Food Systems Biology in Freising, has discovered a receptor for bitter taste in twelve different cartilaginous fish (sharks and rays). The rece

Researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in collaboration with paleontologists from Spain and Poland, used fossil evidence to engineer a soft robotic replica of pleurocystitid, a marine organism that existed n