In a region where skeletal fossils are poorly preserved, old eggshells are opening a window into the evolution, diet and distribution of Madagascar’s extinct birds.

Enhydriodon omoensis dwarfed ancestors of humans who lived alongside it from 2.5 to 3.5 million years ago; the two species may have competed for food.

Up to now, it has been thought that the two-ton Darwin’s ground sloth, which lived up to 10,000 years ago, was strictly vegetarian. Apparently not.

Controversy over the age of an early fossil of Homo erectus has been settled, and has led to other specimens.

The “walking rock” track suggests that a massive volcanic winter may have frozen the tropics during the dawn of the dinosaur age.

Expedition 361’s newest sediment cores brought up spectacular foraminifera—translucent, glassy and “very pretty” throughout the ocean sediment.

If you, like me, are something of a paleo-romantic,
Swooning over dinosaurs both fearsome and gigantic,
Come feast your eyes on new reports the bone-hunters have brought us:
“Fearing nothing” means its name – the mighty beast Dreadnoughtus!

With life, legged and finned, Earth had been teeming,
Slitherers, predators, graceful trees tall …
Now, of these species, we are only dreaming:
Glossopteris, trilobites, eurypterids, all.