All articles tagged with #fossil
A Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District preserve creek in San Mateo County yielded an exceptionally well-preserved mastodon tooth, likely dating from 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. Found by geomorphologist Brigid Lynch, the molar’s condition suggests the animal died nearby and its skull may still be buried at the site. Researchers from Stanford plan to carbon-date the tooth and create a 3-D replica to study the find further.
Geologist Brigid Lynch uncovered an exceptionally preserved 10,000-year-old Pacific mastodon molar in a San Mateo County preserve; paleontologists call it the most complete mastodon tooth found in the area, and the fossil has been donated to Stanford for carbon dating to confirm its age and inform Ice Age biodiversity studies.
Brigid Lynch found a 9-inch fossilized Pacific mastodon tooth in a creek at a San Mateo County open-space preserve. Donated to Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, the tooth—crown and root intact—will be 3D-printed for public outreach, highlighting how protecting open spaces helps reveal ancient wildlife and supports conservation.
A remarkably well-preserved Pacific mastodon molar, estimated to be at least 10,000 years old, was found in a San Mateo County creek and donated to Stanford for carbon dating and 3-D scanning to illuminate Ice Age biodiversity and support future conservation efforts.
A Pacific mastodon molar, about the size of a toaster, was found in a San Mateo County creek in March 2026 on Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District land; hailed as one of the Bay Area’s best-preserved mastodon fossils, it’s now in Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability collection for dating and study to learn more about Ice Age fauna and the region’s ancient landscape.
A fossil pincer over 159 mm long from Praearcturus is reinterpreted in a new Palaeontology revision as a true scorpion rather than a crustacean, ending a century of debate about its affinities. The paper emphasizes limited material, the absence of definitive scorpion features like a sting and pectines due to preservation, and suggests a possible partly aquatic lifestyle for this giant Devonian arachnid, while stopping short of giving a total body length.
A fossilized Late Cretaceous egg found in Antarctica is the largest soft-shelled egg ever discovered and the second-largest egg of any non-avian dinosaur. Named Antarcticoolithus bradyi, the egg likely came from a mosasaur, suggesting these marine reptiles could lay very large eggs and may have been viviparous, though the exact parent species remains uncertain. The egg’s preservation in anoxic sediments helped keep its leathery shell intact.
Analysis of a 236-million-year-old cynodont fossil from Argentina reveals a neonatal bone line indicating live birth, with a newborn mass around 1.68 kg (about 10–20% of an adult), suggesting viviparity originated in the mammalian lineage far earlier than thought (roughly 90–95 million years ago) and proposing two plausible evolutionary scenarios for this trait's emergence.
A rare fossil shows a pliosaurid tooth embedded in an ichthyosaur vertebra, providing direct evidence of a predation event in the Upper Jurassic. CT imaging confirms the tooth’s origin and suggests it was ripped from the predator during a fatal bite, with provenance traced through Victorian-era museum records, illustrating how old collections can reveal dramatic moments from ancient oceans.
Archaeologists in Spain recovered RVH-1, a thick parietal bone fragment from Ruidera, dated to up to 224,000 years ago using uranium-series dating and luminescence. The fragment's features resemble archaic Homo forms seen in Ceprano and Caune de l’Arago, indicating diverse Middle Pleistocene populations persisted in Iberia. The researchers classify RVH-1 as Homo sp. rather than a single species, cautioning against drawing broad conclusions from a partial bone and highlighting a non-linear, multi-population view of European human evolution.
Australian paleontologists report that a 6–7 m ichthyosaur, Platypterygius australis, had two pterosaur jaw fragments preserved in its stomach, the first direct evidence of an ichthyosaur preying on a pterosaur, with Kronosaurus queenslandicus likely delivering a lethal bite to the carcass, capturing a rare three-tier predator sequence in the Cretaceous Eromanga Sea.
Researchers describe a 245-million-year-old marine reptile fossil from China, Austronaga minuta, with well-preserved stomach, liver and intestines. The find shows a simple single-chamber stomach and the organization of the gut, representing the oldest well-preserved digestive tract in a reptile and shedding light on how archosaur digestion evolved ahead of birds and crocodilians.
A 2.8–2.2 million-year-old fossil honeybee from Hyogo, Japan, named Apis aibai, is the youngest known extinct honeybee and the oldest fossil in the Apis subgenus, bridging gaps between the fossil record and genomic dates; its wing and leg morphology closely matches the living Apis nigrocincta, implying a broader ancient distribution and possibly ancestral ties to Apis cerana; the find supports timing estimates for the subgenus’s origin and was published in ZooKeys.
A 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named Gus sold for $50.1 million at Sotheby’s, setting a new fossil price record and highlighting a booming yet controversial market that could restrict researchers' and the public's access to irreplaceable specimens.
A 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex fossil named Gus sold for $50.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York, a new record for a fossil sale after a ten-minute, seven-bidder auction. Gus is about 61% complete, stands 12.5 feet tall and 38 feet long, and was discovered in Harding County, South Dakota, with excavations conducted from 2021 to 2023.