An archaeological team sets the stegomastodon head right side up in Elephant Butte State Park outside Albuquerque, New Mexico.Image: New Mexico Museum of Natural History Randall Gann Most bachelor parties are hazy memories of booze-addled debauchery. But one group of guys stumbled onto something lasting longer than a hangover. The men were hiking through Elephant…
Scorpions have been crawling around our planet for hundreds of millions of years, and while it’s thought that the earliest versions were sea dwellers, when they first made the transition from water to land is hazy. Now, with the discovery of a previously unknown species with a unique combination of features, scientists have evidence to suggest…
Researchers studying a 305-million-year-old fossil reveal that it belonged to a never-before-seen arachnid they named Idmonarachne brasieri. This close relative of the earliest spiders, described in Proceedings of the Royal Study B this week, reveals clues about spider evolution. A team led by Russell Garwood from the University of Manchester examined the remarkably preserved, three-dimensional,…
Fossilization is an incredibly difficult process. Conditions need to be very specific for a deceased organism to last for tens of millions of years. Finding even large bones can be extremely difficult, while finding imprints of soft tissue is the equivalent of hitting the paleontological jackpot. Phil Bell and his team from the University of…