The recently extinct thylacine was Australia’s largest marsupial predator and famously likened to dog-family carnivorans such as wolves. However, here the authors show that its skull functioned differ...

Like many of Earth’s subtropical open ecosystems, the African savanna originated in the Miocene Epoch (23.0 to 5.3 Ma), one of the best historical ...

Abstract. The pineal gland has strong ties to organismal physiology and behaviour, and in several ectothermic clades of tetrapods, it is associated with an

Earth’s climate over the past 539 million years (the Phanerozoic Eon) occupied a few long-lived “mega-climate” regimes. This study shows that life was most vulnerable to extinction during the relative...

Premise The Chicxulub asteroid impact at the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) boundary triggered a mass extinction 66 million years ago. Ferns thrived in the aftermath of the extinction, evidenced by the.....

A celebration of Ernst Haeckel’s sketches of life forms, from microscopic to majestic.

The relative importance of biotic and abiotic factors in clade extinction is unclear. Here the authors identify 2 extinction phases in 12 extinct marine clades, an initial, gradual decline reflecting ...

A well-preserved fossil snake from the Late Cretaceous of Brazil shows early ecological and brain shape disparity in the group.

The fauna of the Fezouata Shale, an Early Ordovician fossil Lagerstätte from Morocco, is transitional between the Cambrian and the Great Ordovician Bi…

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

Molecular clock and preservation of early microfossil assemblages suggest that eukaryotes were present and already diverse more than ~1600 million ...

Abstract. I explore the impact of extinct lineages and limited morphological character data on the expected delay between the origin time of a clade and th

Scientific Reports - Earliest evidence of behavioural handedness in the Ediacaran motile bilaterian Spriggina floundersi