Enlarge (credit: Sergey Krasovskiy )

Blue whales have been considered the largest creatures to ever live on Earth. With a maximum length of nearly 30 meters and weighing nearly 200 tons, they are the all-time undisputed heavyweight champions of the animal kingdom.

Now, digging on a beach in Somerset, UK, a team of British paleontologists found the remains of an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile that could give the whales some competition. “It is quite remarkable to think that gigantic, blue-whale-sized ichthyosaurs were swimming in the oceans around what was the UK during the Triassic Period,” said Dr Dean Lomax, a paleontologist at the University of Manchester who led the study.

Giant jawbones

Ichthyosaurs were found in the seas through much of the Mesozoic era, appearing as early as 250 million years ago. They had four limbs that looked like paddles, vertical tail fins that extended downward in most species, and generally looked like large, reptilian dolphins with elongated narrow jaws lined up with teeth. And some of them were really huge. The largest ichthyosaur skeleton so far was found in British Columbia, Canada, measured 21 meters, and belonged to a particularly massive ichthyosaur called Shonisaurus sikanniensis . But it seems they could get even larger than that.

Enlarge (credit: Carnegie Mellon University )

Until now, when scientists and engineers have developed soft robots inspired by organisms, they’ve focused on modern-day living examples. For instance, we previously reported on soft robot applications that mimicked squid , grasshoppers, and cheetahs . For the first time, however, a team of researchers has now combined the principles of soft robotics and paleontology to build a soft-robot version of pleurocystitid, an ancient sea creature that existed 450 million years ago.

Pleurocystitids are related to modern-day echinoderms like starfish and brittle stars. The organism holds great significance in evolution because it is believed to be the first echinoderm that was capable of moving: It employed a muscular stem to move on the sea bed. But, due to a lack of fossil evidence, scientists never clearly understood how the organism actually used the stem to move underwater. “Although its life habits and posture are reasonably well understood, the mechanisms that control the movement of its stem are highly controversial,” authors of a previously published study focusing on the echinoderm stem note .

The newly developed soft-robot replica (also called the “Rhombot”) of a pleurocystitid has allowed researchers to decode the organism’s movement and various other mysteries linked to the evolution of echinoderms. In their study, they also claim that the replica will serve as the foundation of paleobionics, a relatively new field that uses soft robotics and fossil evidence to explore the biomechanical differences among life forms.

Enlarge / Discovered in 1931, Tridentinosaurus antiquus has now been found to be, in part, a forgery. (credit: Valentina Rossi)

For more than 90 years, scientists have puzzled over an unusual 280 million-year-old reptilian fossil discovered in the Italian Alps. It's unusual because the skeleton is surrounded by a dark outline, long believed to be rarely preserved soft tissue. Alas, a fresh analysis employing a suite of cutting-edge techniques concluded that the dark outline is actually just bone-black paint. The fossil is a fake, according to a new paper published in the journal Paleontology.

An Italian engineer and museum employee named Gualtiero Adami found the fossil near the village of Piné. The fossil was a small lizard-like creature with a long neck and five-digit limbs. He turned it over to the local museum, and later that year, geologist Giorgio del Piaz announced the discovery of a new genus, dubbed Tridentinosaurus antiquus . The dark-colored body outline was presumed to be the remains of carbonized skin or flesh; fossilized plant material with carbonized leaf and shoot fragments were found in the same geographical area.

The specimen wasn't officially described scientifically until 1959 when Piero Leonardi declared it to be part of the Protorosauria group. He thought it was especially significant for understanding early reptile evolution because of the preservation of presumed soft tissue surrounding the skeletal remains. Some suggested that T. antiquus had been killed by a pyroclastic surge during a volcanic eruption, which would explain the carbonized skin since the intense heat would have burnt the outer layers almost instantly. It is also the oldest body fossil found in the Alps, at some 280 million years old.

Enlarge / Grasshoppers, beware! Robopteryx is here to flush you from your hiding place. (credit: Jinseok Park, Piotr Jablonski et al., 2024)

Scientists in South Korea built a robotic dinosaur and used it to startle grasshoppers to learn more about why dinosaurs evolved feathers, according to a recent paper published in the journal Scientific Reports. The results suggest that certain dinosaurs may have employed a hunting strategy in which they flapped their proto-wings to flush out prey, and this behavior may have led to the evolution of larger and stiffer feathers.

As reported previously , feathers are the defining feature of birds, but that wasn't always the case. For millions of years, various species of dinosaurs sported feathers, some of which have left behind fossilized impressions. For the most part, the feathers we've found have been attached to smaller dinosaurs, many of them along the lineage that gave rise to birds—although in 2012, scientists discovered three nearly complete skeletons of a "gigantic" feathered dinosaur species, Yutyrannus huali, related to the ancestors of Tyrannosaurus Rex .

Various types of dino-feathers have been found in the fossil record over the last 30 years, such as so-called pennaceous feathers (present in most modern birds). These were found on distal forelimbs of certain species like Caudipteryx , serving as proto-wings that were too small to use for flight, as well as around the tip of the tail as plumage. Paleontologists remain unsure of the function of pennaceous feathers—what use could there be for half a wing? A broad range of hypotheses have been proposed: foraging or hunting, pouncing or immobilizing prey, brooding, gliding, or wing-assisted incline running, among others.

Enlarge / The Golgi apparatus, shown here in light green, may have been involved in building internal structures in cells. (credit: ARTUR PLAWGO / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY)

Before Neanderthals and Denisovans, before vaguely humanoid primates, proto-mammals, or fish that crawled out of the ocean to become the first terrestrial animals, our earliest ancestors were microbes.

More complex organisms like ourselves descend from eukaryotes , which have a nuclear membrane around their DNA (as opposed to prokaryotes , which don’t). Eukaryotes were thought to have evolved a few billion years ago, during the late Palaeoproterozoic period, and started diversifying by around 800 million years ago. Their diversification was not well understood. Now, a team of researchers led by UC Santa Barbara paleontologist Leigh Ann Riedman discovered eukaryote microfossils that are 1.64 billion years old, yet had already diversified and had surprisingly sophisticated features.

“High levels of eukaryotic species richness and morphological disparity suggest that although late Palaeoproterozoic [fossils] preserve our oldest record of eukaryotes, the eukaryotic clade has a much deeper history,” Riedman and her team said in a study recently published in Papers in Paleontology.

Enlarge / These are the kinds of shark teeth discovered in burial sites and other ceremonial remains of the inland Maya communities. From left to right, there's a fossilized megalodon tooth, great white shark tooth, and bull shark tooth. (credit: Antiquity)

The megalodon , a giant shark that went extinct some 3.6 million years ago, is famous for its utterly enormous jaws and correspondingly huge teeth. Recent studies have proposed that the megalodon was robust species of shark akin to today's great white sharks, only three times longer. And just like the great white shark inspired Jaws , the megalodon has also inspired a 1997 novel and a blockbuster film (2018's The Meg )—not to mention a controversial bit of "docu-fiction" on the Discovery Channel.  But now a team of 26 shark experts are challenging the great white shark comparison, arguing that the super-sized creature's body was more slender and possibly even longer than researchers previously thought in a new paper published in the journal Paleontologia Electronica.

“Our study suggests that the modern great white shark may not necessarily serve as a good modern analogue for assessing at least certain aspects of its biology, including its size,” co-author Kenshu Shimada, a palaeobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, told The Guardian . “The reality is that we need the discovery of at least one complete megalodon skeleton to be more confident about its true size as well its body form.” Thus far, nobody has found a complete specimen, only fossilized teeth and vertebrae.

As previously reported , the largest shark alive today, reaching up to 20 meters long, is the whale shark, a sedate filter feeder. As recently as 4 million years ago, however, sharks of that scale likely included the fast-moving predator megalodon (formally Otodus megalodon ). Due to incomplete fossil data, we're not entirely sure how large megalodons were and can only make inferences based on some of their living relatives, like the great white and mako sharks.

Enlarge / At left, one of the fossils, with stacks of thylakoids highlighted using yellow bars; at right, a higher magnification of the end of the cell. (credit: Demoulin, et. al.)

It's not an exaggeration to suggest that the most significant event on Earth was the evolution of photosynthesis. The ability to harvest energy from light freed life from the need to scavenge energy from its environment. With this new capability, life grew in complexity and invaded new environments, ultimately reshaping the Earth.

For such a pivotal event, we know remarkably little about it. Tracing the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere suggests photosynthesis evolved at least 2.4 billion years ago, although the rise in oxygen levels turns out to be impressively complicated . Tracing the variations of present-day genes places photosynthesis' origin at about 3 billion years ago. That timing is similar to the origin of the photosynthetic cyanobacteria, which both continue to live independently and have been incorporated into plant cells as chloroplasts.

What we don't have is clear evidence of photosynthetic cells of similar age. A few microfossils with similarities to cyanobacteria have been identified, but it's impossible to determine whether they were making the proteins that power photosynthesis. Now, new fossils described by a team at the University of Liège push unambiguous evidence of photosynthesis back over a billion years to 1.7 billion years ago.

Enlarge (credit: Henry Sharpe / AMNH)

In 2015, Deborah Shepherd returned to the site where she and other volunteers had worked on a public fossil dig with family members. That’s when she saw it: a fossil lying there, exposed on the surface. Most people would not have recognized it for what it was: It wasn’t a skull, a leg bone, or even a partial jaw. It was just a chunk of bone.

Shepherd immediately notified a park ranger. That ranger then notified the North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources. Her actions ultimately led to the discovery of what scientists say is not only a new species, but an entirely new genus of mosasaur, a giant marine predator from Late Cretaceous seas. Bite marks preserved on the fossil also suggest that it met its end at the hands—or rather teeth—of another mosasaur.

Meet Jorgie the mosasaur

The new mosasaur was described Monday in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Jǫrmungandr walhallaensis , or "Jorgie" for short, is the name suggested by co-author Clint Boyd, and it’s steeped in Norse mythology. Jǫrmungandr is the name of a sea serpent who circles the world with its body, clasping its tail in its jaws.

Enlarge (credit: Jiri Svoboda)

Trilobites first appear early in the Cambrian and are one of the earliest examples of arthropods, the group that includes all insects. They flourished for over 100 million years, leaving fossils that are seemingly ubiquitous—we've described over 20,000 different trilobite species. That's over three times the number of mammalian species we're aware of.

Despite all those fossils, however, we've never found one with a meal inside it. We've been able to infer what some of them were likely to have been dining on based on their appearance and the ecosystems they were found in, but we haven't been able to establish what they ate with certainty. But today, researchers are describing an exquisitely preserved sample that includes several of the animal's last meals, which suggests that this particular animal was a bit like an aquatic vacuum cleaner.

The last several suppers

The fossil comes from shale deposits found in the Prague Basin of the Czech Republic. Those rocks date from the Ordovician, which came immediately after the Cambrian and lasted until about 450 million years ago. Mixed in among the layers of shale here are harder silicate nodules that have been termed "Rokycany Balls." When these nodules contain fossils, they tend to be well-preserved and provide three-dimensional details of the long-dead organisms.