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Categories: Geoscience: Landslides, Paleontology: Early Mammals and Birds

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A new study has provided the most detailed timeline of mammal evolution to date.

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A 72 to 66-million-year-old embryo found inside a fossilized dinosaur egg sheds new light on the link between the behavior of modern birds and dinosaurs, according to a new study.

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A new extinct reptile species has shed light on how our earliest ancestors became top predators by modifying their teeth in response to environmental instability around 300 million years ago.

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A study investigated the enigma of why sauropod fossils are only found at lower latitudes, while fossils of other main dinosaur types seem ubiquitously present, with many located in the polar regions.

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The evolutionary origin of endothermy (the ability to maintain a warm body and higher energy levels than reptiles), currently believed to have originated separately in birds and mammals, could have occurred nearly 300 million years ago.

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A study finds that there is a 50 percent chance that the common ancestor of birds and dinosaurs had bright colors on its skin, beaks and scales, but 0 percent chance that it had bright colors on its feathers or claws.

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Though discovered more than 45 years ago, fossils of Earth's largest flying animal, Quetzalcoatlus, were never thoroughly analyzed. Now, a scientific team provides the most complete picture yet of this dinosaur relative, its environment and behavior. The pterosaur, with a 40-foot wingspan, walked with a unique gait, but otherwise filled a niche much like herons today. The researchers dispel ideas that it ate carrion and walked like a vampire bat.

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Mere spoonsful of soil pulled from Canada's permafrost are opening vast windows into ancient life in the Yukon, revealing rich new information and rewriting previous beliefs about the extinction dynamics, dates and survival of megafauna like mammoths, horses and other long-lost life forms.

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New research examining whether forests can mitigate flood risk suggests they may offer less protection against major events than had been hoped. Although the work, which was carried out in forest sites in Ireland and the UK, showed forests can suppress small storm flows it also underlined that they are likely to make minimal difference in reducing the devastating impacts of major flood events.

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From 50,000 years to 6,000 years ago, many of the world's largest animals, including such iconic grassland grazers as the woolly mammoth, giant bison, and ancient horses, went extinct. The loss of these grazing species triggered a dramatic increase in fire activity in the world's grasslands, according to a new study.

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Understanding how climate change will affect the flooding of rivers may become easier with a new framework for assessing flood risk that's been developed by an interdisciplinary team.

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Rising oceans get more attention in climate change discussions, but rivers are rising, too, according to new research. The research shows that rivers need more attention in policy management and disaster preparation, both at the coast and farther inland.

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Researchers outline how they were able to establish a clear pattern between the strength of the monsoon season in Nepal and the amount of landsliding over a 30-year period between 1988 and 2018.

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New research shows that humans had a significant role in the extinction of woolly mammoths in Eurasia, occurring thousands of years later than previously thought. An international team of scientists has revealed a 20,000-year pathway to extinction for the woolly mammoth.

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Human-caused bird extinctions are driving losses of functional diversity on islands worldwide, and the gaps they leave behind are not being filled by introduced (alien) species, finds a new study.

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The flying reptiles known as pterosaurs are the closest relatives of dinosaurs and were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. However, many details of pterosaur flight anatomy and performance are still unclear. According to a new study pterosaurs evolved a muscular wing-body junction to reduce drag and improve flight performance.

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New examinations of skeletons and animal embryos have allowed researchers to discover how mammals developed protruding, flexible noses. This study contributes to uncovering the origin of mammals' strong sense of smell and creates the potential for new animal models, like chickens or frogs, that are often used in lab experiments to investigate facial development disorders such as cleft palate.

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Researchers trace the first tusks back to ancient mammal relatives that lived before the dinosaurs and shed light on the evolution of mammalian tusks by first defining what makes a tusk a tusk.

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Humans did not cause woolly mammoths to go extinct -- climate change did. For five million years, woolly mammoths roamed the earth until they vanished for good nearly 4,000 years ago -- and scientists have finally proved why. The hairy cousins of today's elephants lived alongside early humans and were a regular staple of their diet -- their skeletons were used to build shelters, harpoons were carved from their giant tusks, artwork featuring them is daubed on cave walls, and 30,000 years ago, the oldest known musical instrument, a flute, was made out of a mammoth bone.

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Researchers found that complex teeth, a hallmark of mammals, also evolved several times in reptiles, prompting the evolutionary success of plant-eating lizards. However, contrary to mammals their tooth evolution was not unidirectional.