Blurs

A 66-million-year-old fossilised dropping may contain one of the most remarkable snapshots of the final days of the dinosaurs — including a feather that could help explain why some birds survived the extinction that destroyed almost every other dinosaur lineage. There are fossils that preserve bones, footprints, and occasionally; soft tissue. And then there are fossils that preserve something far stranger: the contents of an animal's last meal. In 2016, palaeontologist David DeMar Jr. was prospecting in Montana's Hell Creek Formation when he picked up a small, reddish-brown fossil roughly half the size of a golf ball. It was a coprolite — fossilised animal dung. But something was sticking out of it. Under a hand lens, DeMar realised he was looking at a tiny feather. What followed has turned an unremarkable-looking piece of fossilised waste into an extraordinary palaeontological record. Researchers have now identified several feathers, bird bones and fish scales preserved inside...

For hundreds of millions of years, insects have been remarkably successful. They can fly,  burrow, and swim. They live inside plants, on plants, beneath rocks, in soil, in freshwater and almost everywhere else imaginable. Today, more than a million insect species have been formally described. Yet the further back we travel, the stranger their story becomes. The earliest chapters of insect evolution are largely missing from the fossil record. There is a notorious gap between the earliest evidence of hexapods and the much richer Carboniferous record. Now a newly described fossil from Texas is helping fill part of that gap. And it doesn't look quite like the insect evolutionary story we might expect. The creature, named Chosha praecursor, lived approximately 324 million years ago during the Late Mississippian Epoch. It possessed recognisably insect-like features, including an ovipositor and terminal filament. But it also had something modern insects don't have: multiple segmented ...

Some of the most interesting evidence for ancient life does not look like a fossil. It can look like a wrinkle. Researchers studying Jurassic rocks in Morocco have identified unusual sedimentary structures that may record microbial communities living on the seafloor roughly 180 million years ago. That would not, by itself, be particularly surprising. Microbial life was already widespread in Earth's oceans. The strange part is where these structures formed. The sediments appear to have accumulated in relatively deep water — around 200 metres below the ancient ocean surface. That raises an important question. If sunlight was severely restricted at that depth, what was providing the energy for these organisms? One possibility is that they were not using sunlight at all. They may have been running an ecosystem on chemistry. And if that interpretation is correct, the discovery provides another reminder that the ancient ocean was probably far more biologically diverse — and far stranger ...

Sometimes a fossil is more than the remains of a dead animal. Sometimes it is a geographical mystery.  A creature is discovered thousands of miles from where scientists expected it to be. A tropical species turns up in what was once a surprisingly cold region. A land animal appears on an island separated from the mainland by an ocean. A familiar species is found in rocks that suggest an environment completely unlike the one its living relatives inhabit. These discoveries can force scientists to reconsider ancient geography, climate and migration. But they also raise a more intriguing question: How many times have we underestimated the ability of prehistoric animals to cross the planet? The world they inhabited wasn't the world we know today. Continents moved. Seas appeared and disappeared. Land bridges formed and vanished. Ice sheets expanded. Deserts became grasslands, and forests spread across regions that are now frozen or barren. Coastlines also migrated by hundreds of kilometr...