Learn how fossils form through sedimentation and mineralization. Discover types like moulds, casts, and trace fossils in our ...

Skeleton season may be just around the corner, but the skeleton age dawned with the early Cambrian Period, about 538 million to 506 million years ago. In this time span, most major animal groups ...

When it comes to animals with iconic features, the turtle is high on the list. Deer have horns, kangaroos have pouches, humans have existential dread, and turtles have shells... right? Apparently that ...

Imagine there are ten different types of shells, each the size of a grain of sand, mixed in the bowl of mud in front of you. You want to find each type of individual shell —what do you do? For ...

Scientists have identified a mineral signature for sites that are more likely to contain rare fossils that preserve evidence of soft tissue — essential information to understanding ancient life. Much ...

The brilliant iridescent hues found in ammolite come from tiny air gaps in the fossils’ layers, a new study finds. By Alexa Robles-Gil Millions of years ago, squid-like creatures called ammonites swam ...

If you ask most people to guess why turtles first developed shells, you’ll usually get one answer: the hard shells protect them from predators. That’s the theory scientists have been working with for ...

ALTHOUGH Wells 1 and Scrutton 2 suggested methods of studying fossils to determine probable changes in day length, few studies have followed these suggestions. We have examined fossil bivalve shells ...

The turtle's shell may serve as a protective shield nowadays, but ancient turtles actually developed shells for an entirely different reason, a new study finds. Researchers looked at the remains of 47 ...

Ocean acidification caused a mass extinction of marine life 66 million years ago, research into tiny shell fossils has shown. This could have implications for the current climate crisis, which is also ...