In Earth's fossil record, soft-bodied organisms like jellyfish rarely stand the test of time. What's more, it's hard for any ...

Paleontologists can spend years carefully splitting rocks in search of the perfect fossil. But with a 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab brain, nature did the work, breaking the fossil in just the ...

A revolutionary study from the University of Liverpool has upended fundamental assumptions about the fossilization process, potentially transforming how scientists approach the study of ancient life.

Fossils are certainly fascinating, but the darn things do take rather a long time to form. What if you want to fossilize something as fast as possible? Well, scientists have developed a method of ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When animals, plants and other organisms die, they typically decay completely. But sometimes, ...

The La Brea Tar Pits have stirred the imaginations of scientists and the public for over a century. But the amount of time it took for ancient animals to become buried in asphalt after enduring ...

Eleanor has an undergraduate degree in zoology from the University of Reading and a master’s in wildlife documentary production from the University of Salford. Eleanor has an undergraduate degree in ...

In 2011, excavators at a mine in Alberta, Canada, unearthed a surprise: a 110 million-year-old fossil of a nodosaur (a type of armored dinosaur) so impeccably preserved that it still had skin and ...

Scientists have discovered a new way to simulate the fossilization process in a lab in about 24 hours. They take materials like feathers, lizard feet, and leaves and cook them in a lab oven under heat ...