Researchers have discovered the fossilised remains of an ancient whale with huge, fearsome teeth. Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists have dubbed the 12 million-year-old creature "Leviathan". It is thought to have been more than 17m long, and might have engaged in fierce battles with other giant sea creatures from the time. Leviathan was much like the modern sperm whale in terms of size and appearance. But that is where the similarity ends. While the sperm whale is a relatively passive animal, sucking in squid from the depths of the ocean, Leviathan was an aggressive predator. According to Dr Christian de Muizon, director of the Natural History Museum in Paris, Leviathan could have hunted out and fed on large sea creatures such as dolphins, seals and even other...

Palaeontologists have discovered two mammal hairs encased in 100 million-year-old amber. While older 2D fossilised hairs are known, those preserved in the amber are the oldest 3D specimens known. The hairs, found alongside a fly pupa in amber uncovered in southwest France, are remarkably similar to hair found on modern mammals. That implies that the shape and structure of mammal hair has remained unchanged over a vast period of time. "We have 2D hair imprints as early as the Middle Jurassic," says Dr Romain Vullo of the University of Rennes, France, who discovered the hair. The Jurassic Period lasted from 200 to 145 millions of years ago, followed by the Cretaceous Period which lasted to 65 million years ago.

Tooth by deadly tooth, dinosaurs with a hunger for meat bit using four basic techniques, with strength sacrificed for speed and vice versa, new research finds. Carnivorous dinosaurs ranged from weak yet fast nippers, like Velociraptor, to strong and efficient biters, such as Tyrannosaurus rex. Tyrannosaurs, allosaurs, ceratosaurs, and parrot-like dinosaurs, such as Citipati, inflicted the most damaging, efficient bites, the new research suggests. These dinosaurs didn't even have many teeth, compared to certain other dinos. But the teeth they possessed did the job well, like ripping the heads off of prey. "These dinosaurs have consistently high efficiency in biting along the entirety of their relatively short tooth rows," said Manabu Sakamoto, author of the study, published...

Meet "Phoenix," a new pterosaur that once flew over what is now the Sahara desert. The giant flying reptile, also known as a pterodactyl, lived 95 million years ago and is described in the latest issue of the journal PLoS ONE. Its scientific name is Alanqa saharica, which basically means "Phoenix of the Sahara" in Arabic. The Phoenix was a mythological flying creature that died in a fire and was reborn from the ashes of that fire. This pterosaur Phoenix, however, was reborn out of ancient fossils unearthed in the Sahara. “When this pterosaur was alive, the Sahara desert was a river bed basin lush with tropical plant and animal life,” explains project leader Nizar Ibrahim, a University College Dublin researcher.

A newly discovered five-ton dinosaur has the largest horns ever found on a dinosaur, with a set that were 4-feet-long each, according to paleontologists who unearthed the hefty herbivore in Mexico. The name of the new species, Coahuilaceratops magnacuerna, translates in part to "great horned horny face," and the dinosaur lives up to its description. In addition to the two enormous horns above each eye, it also had an unusual, rounded nose horn not seen before on any other dinosaur. "The large horns certainly would have been heavy to haul around, but we know from related animals that horned dinosaurs had very large neck muscles to take care of this problem," project leader Mark Loewen told Discovery News. Loewen, a paleontologist at the Utah Museum of Natural History at...

Researchers have discovered a nearly complete fossil of a dinosaur which appears to have been caught in a collapsing sand dune. The Seitaad ruessi fossil, described in the journal PLoS One, is a relative of the long-necked sauropods that were once Earth's biggest animals. S. ruessi, found in what is now Utah, could have walked on all four legs, or risen up to walk on just two. It is from the Early Jurassic period, between 175 and 200 million years ago. At that time, all of Earth's continents were still joined in the super-continent Pangaea, and sauropodomorphs like S. ruessi have been found in South America and Africa.

Unlike the sauropods to which they are related, S. ruessi was relatively small, about a metre tall and 3.5-4m long with its lengthy neck and tail,...

A newly found 29-foot-long tyrannosaur flashed more teeth than the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex, with which it shared a common ancestor, according to a paper in the latest Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Remains of the badlands dinosaur, Bistahieversor sealeyi, were collected in the first paleontological excavation from a federal wilderness area, the Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness of New Mexico. The dino's remains were removed VIP-style, airlifted by a helicopter operated by the Air Wing of the New Mexico Army National Guard.

"Bistahieversor sealeyi is the first valid new genus and species of tyrannosaur to be named from western North America in over 30 years," said co-author Thomas Williamson, curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History....

Two skulls originally found in 1967 have been shown to be about 195,000 years old, making them the oldest modern human remains known to science. The age estimate comes from a re-dating of Ethiopian rock layers close to those that yielded the remarkable fossils. The skulls, known as Omo I and II, push back the known presence of Homo sapiens in Africa by 40,000 years. The latest dating work is reported in the science journal Nature. It puts the specimens close to the time expected for the evolutionary emergence of our species. Genetic studies have indicated Homo sapiens arose in East Africa - possibly Ethiopia or Tanzania - just over 200,000 years ago.

"These are the earliest known examples of our own species and that suggests they lived earlier still," commented...

The fossilised skull of a colossal "sea monster" has been unearthed along the UK's Jurassic Coast. The ferocious predator, which is called a pliosaur, terrorised the oceans 150 million years ago. The skull is 2.4m long, and experts say it could belong to one of the largest pliosaurs ever found: measuring up to 16m in length. The fossil, which was found by a local collector, has been purchased by Dorset County Council.

It was bought with money from the Heritage Lottery Fund, and it will now be scientifically analysed, prepared and then put on public display at Dorset County Museum. Palaeontologist Richard Forrest told the BBC: "I had heard rumours that something big was turning up. But seeing this thing in the flesh, so to speak, is just jaw dropping. It is...

A baby woolly mammoth that died after being sucked into a muddy river bed 40,000 years ago has revealed more prehistoric secrets of how the species survived in its icy habitat. The mammoth, known as Lyuba, was about a month old when she died in the Siberian tundra, where she remained until she was discovered by reindeer herders three years ago. Her body was so well preserved in the permafrost that her stomach retained traces of her mother’s milk, and scientists identified sediment in her mouth, trunk and throat — suggesting that she suffocated while struggling to free herself from the mud.

The mammoth has taught researchers much about the species that they had been unable to glean from fossils and other less well-preserved finds, including how brown fat cells on the humped back...