Fossils

Brontosaurus skeleton sketch

Where Dinosaurs Roamed

Footprints at one of the nation's oldest—and most fought over—fossil beds offer new clues to how the behemoths lived

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How to Make a Dodo

Biologist Beth Shapiro has figured out a recipe for success in the field of ancient DNA research

A field crew in Kenya excavates a Homo erectus skull.

Head Case

Two fossils found in Kenya raise evolutionary questions

Anthropologists recently found fossils of Paranthropus robustus, also called robust australopithecines, in an excavation site in South Africa. Paranthropus coexisted with human ancestors Homo habilis and Homo erectus as recently as 1.5 million years ago. Some anthropologists had believed that Paranthropus' limited diet caused its extinction, but new evidence from the fossils suggests that Paranthropus had a varied diet that included both hard and soft plants as well as herbivores.

Teeth Tales

Fossils tell a new story about the diversity of hominid diets

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Neil Shubin, Paleontologist, University of Chicago

The "missing link?" At least a step in a new direction

A tiny blob of stretchy brown matter, soft tissue from inside the leg bone, suggests the specimen had not completely decomposed.

Dinosaur Shocker

Probing a 68-million-year-old T. rex, Mary Schweitzer stumbled upon astonishing signs of life that may radically change our view of the ancient beasts

Indicating that Neanderthals buried their dead, a stone-lined pit in southwest France held the 70,000-year-old remains of a man wrapped in bearskin. The illustration is based on a diorama at Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Rethinking Neanderthals

Research suggests they fashioned tools, buried their dead, maybe cared for the sick and even conversed. But why, if they were so smart, did they disappear?

Born in Kenya in 1903 to Anglican missionaries, Louis Leakey (in his mother's arms outside the family's mud and thatch house) was initiated as a youth into the Kikuyu tribe. "I still often think in Kikuyu, dream in Kikuyu," he wrote in a 1937 autobiography.

The Old Man of Olduvai Gorge

Irrepressible Louis Leakey, patriarch of the fossil-hunting family, championed the search for human origins in Africa, attracting criticism and praise

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Stories in Stone Read From Ancient Leaves

A Smithsonian scientist studies the relationship between Eocene insects and the plants they ate

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The Great Martian Fossil Hunt

If bacterial life did arise on an Earth-like early Mars, we should be able to find its fossil remains preserved in those red rocks

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