EARLY EARTH

News About The Primordial Earth

1,835 articles

Ancient Megafauna Extinctions Left Food Web Scars Felt Across Continents Today
Apr 27, 2026 (SPX)
The results were published April 27 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When any species goes extinct, the web of relationships amon...
Fossil Evidence Points to Giant Apex-Predator Octopuses in Cretaceous Seas
Apr 23, 2026 (SPX)
Because octopuses are soft-bodied animals, they leave almost no fossil trace. The research team focused instead on fossilized jaws - the only hard structure oct...
Ancient croc relative shifted from four legs to two as it matured
Mar 09, 2026 (SPX)
Researchers from the University of Washington Department of Biology and the Burke Museum analyzed limb proportions from hundreds of fossils to reconstruct how t...
Deep sea wrinkles reveal ancient chemosynthetic microbes
Feb 16, 2026 (SPX)
Martindale, an associate professor at the Jackson School of Geosciences, recognized the texture from Early Triassic microbial mat examples she had studied in gr...
Ancient trilobite shells reveal durable chitin and long term carbon storage
Feb 08, 2026 (SPX)
Chitin is the primary organic component of modern crab shells and insect exoskeletons and is considered Earths second most abundant naturally occurring polymer ...
Some early life forms may have breathed oxygen well before it filled the atmosphere
Feb 08, 2026 (SPX)
A new study by MIT researchers suggests some early forms of life may have evolved the ability to use oxygen hundreds of millions of years before the GOE. The fi...
Ancient lungfish fossils refine early vertebrate story
Feb 04, 2026 (SPX)
In two separate studies, researchers have re-examined fossil material from the Late Devonian Gogo Formation in Western Australia and described a new lungfish sp...
Juvenile sauropods fed a hungry Late Jurassic predator guild
Feb 02, 2026 (SPX)
The study, published in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin, draws on fossils from the Morrison Formation laid down about 150 million ...
'Extraordinary' trove of ancient species found in China quarry
Jan 28, 2026 (AFP)
The treasure trove of fossils offers a rare glimpse into a cataclysmic event that brought a sudden end to the greatest explosion of life in our planet's history...
Ancient nitrogen enzyme study illuminates early Earth conditions and life detection
Jan 26, 2026 (SPX)
The team focused on nitrogenase, an enzyme central to the biological process that converts atmospheric nitrogen into forms that living organisms can use. Study ...
Cosmic krypton timestamps reveal Australia landscape evolution and resources
Jan 14, 2026 (SPX)
The international team, led by Curtin's Timescales of Mineral Systems Group in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, worked with colleagues from the Unive...
Signs of Ancient Life Turn Up in an Unexpected Place
Jan 14, 2026 (SPX)
Martindale and her colleagues, including Stephane Bodin of Aarhus University, were trekking through the rocky valley to study the ecology of the ancient reef sy...
Ordovician mass extinction cleared the way for jawed fishes to rise
Jan 13, 2026 (SPX)
A new analysis of early vertebrate fossils shows that this biological catastrophe set the stage for the later dominance of jawed fishes, or gnathostomes, in mar...
Ancient bee nests found inside Caribbean cave fossils
Dec 17, 2025 (SPX)
One hutia jaw contained an alveolus whose interior surface was smooth rather than the rough texture typical of bone, drawing the attention of Florida Museum doc...
Fossil bird shows fatal stone-filled throat and hints of dinosaur bird survival story
Dec 05, 2025 (SPX)
Jingmai O'Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at Chicago's Field Museum and lead author of the new species description in the journal Palaeontologica E...
'You don't need a big brain to fly' and other lessons from the first flying reptiles
Dec 05, 2025 (SPX)
Of these, pterosaurs were the first to master flight, more than 215 million years ago - long before the appearance of the earliest birds. For decades, scientist...
Pterosaur brains evolved pathways to flight different from birds
Nov 27, 2025 (SPX)
Researchers examined the fossil of Ixalerpeton, an early pterosaur relative from the Triassic period in Brazil. Using microCT scanning and 3D imaging on more th...
Ancient giant shark fossils reveal early mega-predator dominance in Australian seas
Nov 25, 2025 (SPX)
Modern sharks trace their origins to the Age of Dinosaurs, with the oldest known lamniform fossils dated to about 135 million years ago. These early sharks star...
Drilling deep to study the oxygenation of Earth
Nov 20, 2025 (SPX)
The oxygenation of the planet, known as the "Great Oxygenation Event" or GOE, was undeniably monumental, but relatively little is known about the exact timing o...
Ancient Arctic sediments revise understanding of wildfires in the Early Triassic
Nov 18, 2025 (SPX)
For years, the scarcity of visible charcoal in geologic layers led scientists to believe wildfires nearly vanished after the Great Dying, which eliminated most ...
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