Approximately 12 million years ago, a massive volcano in the southwestern corner of Idaho erupted and spread a tremendous blanket of ash over a large area. Much of this ash settled over the grasslands of northeastern Nebraska. Animals consumed the ash-covered grasses, and eventually they began to perish as a result of consuming this abrasive powder. Eventually these animals and their skeletons...

A fossil of a small, feathered animal, Longisquama insignis, that lived approximately 220 million years ago (Ma) in what is now Central Asia, was re-discovered recently in the dusty drawers of a Moscow museum collection. This discovery has rocked the paleontological world because the fossil exhibits feather impressions, making it possibly the world's oldest known bird. Archaeopteryx, thought until...

Fossil enthusiasts Roy Shephard and Luci Algar combined their professional skills in media and education to develop this informative and entertaining website. Designed to be educational and accessible to children, this site presents a wide variety of information about fossils. The site contains a nice collection of images and diagrams; and includes a fossils guide for beginners, information on...

This website presents the Fossil Mammal Research Group whose "members are palaeontologists and archaeologists as well as palaeoenvironmental specialists in the School of Biological & Earth Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University, UK." Subjects of study by the Research group include mammalian fauna development over the past 30 million years, Plio-Pleistocene and Holocene climate change, and...

This Topic in Depth begins with a Web site from the Royal Ontario Museum called Fossils!-Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1). It gives a light-hearted but informative introduction to what fossils are and how they're formed, collected, and identified. Next, the University of California Museum of Paleontology offers the Web site Learning From the Fossil Record (2), which contains several learning...

Ride the Web Geological Time Machine at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Click on an item in the list of 25 geological periods [15 of the 25 periods are available now, the remainder to be completed] and view a page describing each period, its subdivisions, and the life and fossils of that period.

A team of paleontologists working in Cretaceous-aged rocks of the Gobi Desert have unearthed a dinosaur fossil containing a comb-like plate very similar to the filter-feeding structure in a duck's bill. An article by Norell, Makovicky and Currie, published in this week's Nature, describes the finding. The dinosaur, Gallimimus, was a fast-running, largish, beaked creature closely related to...

The November 3rd edition of the journal Science contains news of the recent discovery of what might be the earliest bipedal reptile. This page from the University of Toronto is an illustrated news release about the discovery. The 290-million-year-old fossil, found in Germany in 1993, looks like an upright lizard approximately 25-30 cm long with forearms and a long tail. The reptile lived before...

This Website is the labor of love of Mike Everhart, who in 1978 found his first mosasaur, an extinct giant marine reptile that resembles an overgrown crocodile. From that point forward, Everhart devoted his energy to hunting for fossils of marine reptiles, and he now is Adjunct Curator of Paleontology at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History. Oceans of Kansas provides information about life in...

The Smithsonian National Museum of History's paleobiology department is celebrating 50 years as one of the world's top resources for information about the biological and environmental history of Earth. From the homepage, where historical photographs of Smithsonian researchers grace the screen, click Blog & News, where you can read about recently arrived dinosaur bones and newly discovered fossils....