Scientists have discovered prehistoric insects preserved in amber for the first time in South America, providing a fresh glimpse into life on Earth at a time when flowering plants were just beginning to diversify and spread around the world.

Many of the specimens found at a sandstone quarry in Ecuador date to 112 million years ago, said Fabiany Herrera, curator of fossil plants at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the study published Thursday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

The oldest known relative of lizards has been uncovered in the UK.

A new species of ancient reptile, known as Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae, reveals that the evolution of these animals was quite different than scientists had imagined.

An extinct species has revealed new twists in the tale of lizards and their relatives.

Discovered near the town of Sidmouth in Devon, Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae was an insect-eating reptile that lived more than 241 million years ago during the Middle Triassic. It’s part of a reptile group known as the lepidosaurs, which contains snakes, lizards and an animal known as the tuatara.

Tiny bones locked in stone for millions of years have finally told their sad story.

The 150-million-year-old fossils belong to a pair of pterosaur hatchlings, both of whom appear to have perished in a spectacularly violent weather event, paleontologists have now discovered.

Last year, a Stegosaurus nicknamed “Apex” sold at auction for US$40.5 million. A juvenile Ceratosaurus fetched US$30.5 million just last month.

Supporters of these sales argue that they’re harmless, or even good for science. Others compare fossils to art objects, praising their beauty or historical charm.

As paleontologists, we say plainly: these views could not be more misguided.

Fossils are neither art objects nor trophies. They are scientific data that provide a tangible record of Earth’s deep history. Fossils are essential tools for understanding evolution, extinction, climate change and the origins and disappearances of ecosystems.

Named Huashanosaurus qini, the new dinosaur species is estimated to have been around 12 m (39 feet) long.

It lived in what is now China’s Guangxi autonomous region from the Early to Middle Jurassic, 200 to 162 million years ago.

“Jurassic sauropods are well represented in China, especially in Yunnan, Sichuan, Chongqing and Xinjiang, with only a few localities known in Gansu, Ningxia, Anhui, Tibet and Guizhou,” said lead author Dr. Jinyou Mo from the Natural History Museum of Guangxi and colleagues.

In the study, University of Reading researcher Jorge Avaria-Llautureo and his colleagues used statistical modeling and fossil data to reconstruct ancient environments and trace where the common ancestors of all modern primates lived.

“For decades, the idea that primates evolved in warm, tropical forests has gone unquestioned,” Dr. Avaria-Llautureo said.

“Our findings flip that narrative entirely. It turns out primates didn’t emerge from lush jungles — they came from cold, seasonal environments in the northern hemisphere.”

“Understanding how ancient primates survived climate change helps us think about how living species might respond to modern climate change and environmental changes.”

Primates that could travel far when their local weather changed quickly were better at surviving and having babies that lived to become new species.

When primates moved to completely different, more stable climates, they traveled much further distances — about 561 km on average compared to just 137 km for those staying in similar, unstable climates.

A museum in outback Queensland, Australia, has revealed a fossil pearl dating back 100 million years, a discovery described by scientists as one of the rarest of its kind.

The marble-sized sphere, about two centimeters across, went on display at the Kronosaurus Korner Museum in Richmond. The pearl was first unearthed in 2019 during a public dig, when a visiting tourist lifted a fragment of an Inoceramus shell from the museum’s excavation site.

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A fossil discovered in Patagonia shows a 3.5-metre-long reptile from the late Cretaceous with large, serrated teeth capable of slicing through muscle

Near the Syrian city of Afrin, an international research team, including researchers from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoenvironment at the University of Tübingen, has discovered a previously unknown fossil sea turtle.

The species Syriemys lelunensis, newly named under the aegis of the University of São Paulo, dates from the early Eocene, about 50 million years ago. The find includes a completely preserved interior impression of the shell as well as parts of the ventral carapace, pelvis, and hind legs. The turtle is the first newly described fossil vertebrate species from Syria. The research is published in Papers in Palaeontology.

The oval, well-preserved carapace of the fossil sea turtle is 53 centimeters long and 44 centimeters wide. "For 13 years, the bone fragments from the Eocene period were kept in the office of the General Directorate of Geology and Mineral Resources in Aleppo after they had been recovered in 2010 during a blast in the Al-Zarefeh quarry near the city of Afrin," explains Wafa Adel Alhalabi, a Syrian-Brazilian paleontologist and the study's first author from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. "Together with colleagues from Brazil, Syria, Germany, Lebanon and Canada, we have now scientifically described this animal."

The iguanodontian dinosaur, whose fossils were found on the Isle of Wight, was identified by Dr Jeremy Lockwood, a PhD student at the University of Portsmouth and the Natural History Museum.

Prior to Lockwood’s analysis, the fossils, which date back 125m years, were assumed to have belonged to one of the two known dinosaur species from the Isle of Wight.

The Polish Geological Institute-National Research Institute reports a Lower Devonian (419 to 393 million years ago) fossilized trackway in the Holy Cross Mountains, Poland, attributed to dipnoan fish. Their analysis finds what appears to be the earliest record of fish testing the land mobility skills of vertebrates, predating by about 10 million years the first evidence of fully terrestrial tetrapod locomotion.