Millions of years ago, the land you’re currently sitting on was located at a completely different latitude. Your backyard crossed thousands of miles to reach its particular point on the planet, and ...

The now-extinct mollusk may have reached up to 60 feet in length, researchers have found Yohei Utsuki, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Hokkaido University A giant "kraken" octopus may have ...

Today’s octopuses are intelligent, remarkably flexible animals that lurk in reefs, hide in crevices, or drift through the deep sea. But new research suggests that their earliest relatives may have ...

Giant octopuses measuring up to 62 feet (19 meters) in length were among the top ocean predators around 100 million years ago, according to new research that uncovered rare fossils hidden within solid ...

Scientists have solved a long-standing geological mystery about where the Colorado River flowed during a roughly 5-million-year gap in the geological record, according to researchers at UCLA.

Researchers studying a 250-million-year-old fossil have found the first ever proof that mammal ancestors laid eggs, with the discovery also shedding light on a remarkable survival story. The fossil, ...

You can’t make a mammal-ette without laying some eggs. The duck-billed platypus wasn’t the only mammal to lay eggs. Analysis of a fossil in South Africa proves that our mammalian ancestors were ...

Hundreds of millions of years ago, Earth’s magnetic field behaved in a way that has long baffled scientists, showing wild and seemingly chaotic shifts unlike anything seen before or since. A new study ...

Three-hundred-million years ago, Earth was very different. The continents had coalesced into Pangea, which was dominated in its equatorial regions by vast coal-swamp forests. With high atmospheric ...

Bubbles in a 3-million-year-old ice core have allowed researchers to measure gases in the atmosphere during the late Pliocene for the first time. This epoch, when global temperatures are thought to ...

Thirteen million years ago, a medium-sized monkey known for guarding its territory among the treetops with a fearsome "howl" started doing something new. This monkey, one of the oldest known ancestors ...